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Desktop "Wait for window" step does not reset within loop?

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Posted on by FBayer

I'm trying to build a flow that takes an action any time a certain Windows notification appears, which looks like this:

This works fine on the first iteration. However, on the second iteration, PAD will immediately pass the "Wait for window" instruction, indicating that this doesn't reset properly, even though when it then pulls the WindowProperty variable, it comes up empty, so then the "Else" condition takes effect and my flow ends. (Without that "Else" condition, it will simply continue looping while doing nothing.)

Is there any way I can force the "Wait for window" step to reset itself each time the loop restarts, so that it actually does wait for the notification to reappear? As you can see, I added the "close window" step, but that hasn't done the trick.

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Power Automate Desktop

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VJR 7,635 on at

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Hi @FBayer

Could you please clarify what you mean by "Wait for window step to reset itself"?

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FBayer 21 on at

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I already explained in my post.

The first time the loop runs, it waits for a Windows notification window to appear.

The second time the loop runs, it just continues, without waiting for a new notification to appear.

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VJR 7,635 on at

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Since in the "Wait for window" action you are not changing anything so there's nothing to reset.

Try adding a static Wait before the Wait for window.

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scooterk97 10 on at

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Hi @FBayer . I am having the exact same issue as well. Did you ever find a fix?

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FBayer 21 on at

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Not really, I took out the loop so now I manually re-trigger the flow after each time it executes, which is annoying but better than nothing. You could probably come up with a better workaround using cloud flows (effectively creating a "trigger loop") but I don't have a cloud licence.

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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There is nothing to reset when waiting for a window or a window content. It does not cache the fact that it successfully found a window previously. It will check for the window to exist in the screen every time. If it continues immediately, it means that your window must exist.

I have had experience with a certain notification pop-up in an ERP system called Microsoft Dynamics Axapta that actually is "always present" but not always visible. So, the Wait for window action and the If window condition would always find it, even if it visually did not appear on the screen. I modified the selector to only pick up the window when its "Visible" property was true. This solved the issue for that specific case. You might want to check if that's not the case for you, too.

This should probably be the case for you, too, because if the window wasn't there, the Get details of window would fail and throw an error saying it could not find the window to extract the details from, instead of actually returning an empty value.
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scooterk97 10 on at

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Thanks, @FBayer . I recently switched to "Wait for Image" and my loop has been working fine. Thanks for the reply and good luck to you!

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