Avoiding variable use in apply to each

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Posted on by DaveHepler

Greetings,

First help post but I have been using this board regularly for help. Now I have a question without a obvious answer...

I have a flow with an apply to each. I learned quickly when doing this it pays to avoid variables as you have to set concurrency to 1 if you do. My specific issue is with using a switch inside an apply to each. See the flow below, again all inside and apply to each. I take job number which is say 20-6105 and grab "6" in Compose. Switch takes that number and sets "Salesman" variable based on the Compose output. The value in "Salesman" is used to point the Sharepoint Get Items to the correct list.

The fourth position of job number, "6" in my example equates to the salesman. I need a method to convert these AND use the correct answer to perform the get items. I can't use compose as the "outputs()" will be different depending on the outcome of switch. To be clear the flow below works perfectly. Its simply WAY too slow. The runtime is about 4 hours.

So... Please help me get rid of this variable if possible.

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Building flows

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v-litu-msft Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @DaveHepler,

Could you please share the run history that runtime is about 4 hours?

I don't think set variable action will take too many times, generally, it just only takes serval seconds to run. And the 4 hours may be token by the Get items cause there are too many items.

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
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DaveHepler 2 on at

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Lin,

I wasn't clear. My flow runs as follows:
1. get items from SharePoint list ~ 325 items.
(Loop)
2. For each item, read one or two CSV files with ~10 lines each.
(Loop)
3. Add several items from these CSV to obtain totals held in several variables.
4. Update SharePoint list item from 1. with totals.
5. next item from 1. list.

Please ignore "failure action" this is simply checking for the second file that not all items have. The flow does not fail and that is not taking the time.

This results in nested loops. Since I am setting variables inside loops, and variables are global, I must set concurrency to 1, correct? When I set concurrency to 1, runtime is increased by 20x. I have similar flows where I was able to avoid variable use and instead use expressions and compose operations so I can keep concurrency high. These other flows run quickly. ~ 15 minutes.