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Working out a flow that doesn't use 500,000 flow runs in a week

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Bit of an exagerated title perhaps.

We currently have a need for users to move documents between two site collections, which is working perfectly. My concern currently is that it is neededing to use the 'trigger when created and modified' trigger option. This means when a document is so much as opened and edited it will run an instance of the flow (using one flow run).

The flow is simple, when it is triggered it checks a (with a simple condition of coloumn value=yes) column 'transfer' with the options yes/no. With no the flow ends, with yes it gets meta data, content data, creates a new file (in the new site collection) and deletes the old one.

I am looking at schedualling but i am not sure how to get the flow to check all documents within a given library and the knock on effects of checking a library of a few thousand documents and whether doing such a thing counts as a flow run per item or a flow run for the entire flow.

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v-yuazh-msft Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @Anonymous,

If you want to get the flow to check all documents within a given library,you could use the trigger "When a file is created or modified(Properties only)" in your flow.

You could leave the Folder field blank.

And the flow would run for every new all modified file in the library.

Best regards,

Alice

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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I am not sure i was clear enough to start with, that is already what i am doing. But this leads to every single change to a document running a flow no matter how small. Which would lead to our run limit being maxed very quickly.

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ScottShearer 25,294 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@Anonymous- unless it is critical that the documents be moved immediately, you might consider running a Flow with a recurrence trigger. You might run it a few times a day. The Flow will then retrieve only those documents that meet the criteria to me moved - that can be accomplished via an OData filter. You can then loop through the items that were returned and take action to copy them over to the new library.

Please post here if you need an example.

Scott

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Please, this whole thing is destroying my sanity.

I would be massively greatful to you if you could. It would save me a whole heap of R&D trying to work it out alone.

Thanks in advance.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Another question, does a single run of that flow (with an apply to each file loop) use one flow run, or does it use a flow run per loop ?

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v-yuazh-msft Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @Anonymous,

A single run of the flow that with an apply to each file loop only use one flow run.

Best regards,

Alice

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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@v-yuazh-msft

Is this the same for all aspects of a flow, such as parallel branch ?

As i am thinking of cutting down on flow runs by having a single flow run across many libraries using parallel branching.

Or is it better practice to run a flow in series when schedualling a flow for multiple libraries ?

This is just showing the flow i am running that works fine, Wondering if i can just do multiple "Get files" actions and multiple "apply to each" So that one flow does the actions for multiple libraries rather than having one flow per library. And whether it is better to work in parallel or series given Flow runs are a factor.

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