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Topics interacting with long running HTTP services

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Posted on by paolt Microsoft Employee

Hello! I'm a newcomer to Copilot Studio and have a question about something I'm not able to do. I have created a topic, and added an HTTP request action to interact with an external API. This API might be relatively long running. First question is: can I show to the user a nice message saying that their request is being managed? Second question: I expect this might cause a timeout; is there a way to "kind of" subscribe to a postback? I hope the need is clear, and happy to hear about different approaches if this is not well thought for Copilot Studio.

Thanks in advance,

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remidyon on at

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Hi @paolt
It is always tricky to call an API from copilot studio if that API can run for a long time. Best practice is to keep the HTTP call as fast as possible. You can tell the user that the action might take a while before returning a value but if that last more than a few minutes your users are not going to wait.
Depending what your API is doing and your use case you could call your API from a power automate flow asynchronously (ie: you call the power automate flow which will return a value directly to your copilot and then call the API - this way the process is running in the back).
Of course that depends on your use case: can you share what this API is doing?

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cchannon 4,702 Moderator on at

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Does your API return a 202 that will then let you move on and check in periodically on progress? If so, I would call the API, upon getting a 202 I would send a message to the user saying "working it" or something like that, then invoke a Power Automate flow that can run asynchronously in the background, polling the API until the response is ready. The Power Automate flow can send back a response at any time to your Copilot, at which point it can provide a response to the user. But in the meantime your user isn't stuck wondering whether things are working or not, and you aren't risking a timeout in the app.

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