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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / Turn a flow off and NO...
Power Automate
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Turn a flow off and NOT have runs queued?

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Posted on by 12

I've seen the article Turn flows on or off - Power Automate | Microsoft Docs and the note that says "If you turn a off a flow, its runs are queued and they'll run when you turn the flow on". I've read that this is "...an important feature to avoid data loss -- this allows you to temporarily disable a flow, make corrections, and then enable the flow, running it over all of the events that happened in the interim. Without this functionality all of those business critical events would be lost.", but this is 5 years old.

 

My issue is that the reason I turn the flow off for a period of time is because I don't want the flow to be triggered - I may be working on an issue or importing things and don't want people to get emails generated from the flow. In this scenario, having the runs queued defeats the purpose of being able to turn it off. There is no issue of data loss in this scenario.

 

How to work around the "feature"? Should I copy the flow and create a new one that doesn't know about the queued runs? then delete the old flow?

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  • Verified answer
    RezaDorrani Profile Picture
    12,143 on at

    Hi @juliea 

     

    This is by design.

    An option would be to turn off the flow.

    When ready to turn on, export the flow, delete the current flow & create a new flow using the exported flow.

     

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  • rgentile Profile Picture
    89 on at

    While I can see times when Flow runs being queued would be beneficial, I agree with @juliea that having Flow runs queued defeats the purpose of being able to turn the Flow off.  

     

    In my case, I'm working on a new version (Ver3) of a live Flow (Ver2).  Ver3 was created by copying Ver2 so both Flows have the same trigger.  Ver3 was off while I was working on it then when I turned it on to test, all the Ver2 runs that were queued ran which caused a bunch of duplicate data. 

     

    @RezaDorrani, thanks for the suggested workaround.  On a side note some of your videos on Power App data grids using SharePoint lists were very helpful to my team.

     

    @Microsoft it sure would be a lot simpler if we could just turn Flow run queuing on/off.

     

    Thanks

  • rgentile Profile Picture
    89 on at

    Here is another possible workaround that uses a Trigger Condition:
    https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Community-Blog/Flow-with-quot-When-an-item-is-created-or-modified-quot-triggers/ba-p/817459

  • Verified answer
    rgentile Profile Picture
    89 on at

    We found it easiest to just add a Terminate action immediately below the trigger.  This allowed the queued runs to execute while preventing the rest of the Flow actions from executing.  Once the queued runs ran we just removed the Terminate action.

  • jerinke Profile Picture
    21 on at

    An easy way to temporarily turn off a flow is remove any existing trigger conditions (we save them in a Compose so they are handy later), set the trigger condition to @false.  When you want to turn the flow on again, remove the @false and restore the previous trigger conditions.

  • rgentile Profile Picture
    89 on at

    Clever. 🙂  So, @false as the trigger condition prevents the Flow from continuing to execute while not having to turn the Flow off so runs don't get queued, right?

  • jerinke Profile Picture
    21 on at

    Correct.  Since the flow isn't really turned off, there is no "queue".  The trigger condition is saying, "only run if @false is true" and that will never happen.  So the flow doesn't run, there is no queue, and when you want it to run you simply replace the trigger condition.

  • rgentile Profile Picture
    89 on at

    Thanks for the confirmation on how your suggestion works and for taking the time to share your solution with your fellow developers.

  • Vishnu181296 Profile Picture
    2 on at
    In the case of a push trigger, such as when a Power Apps button is clicked, does the que not occur?

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