State machines

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Posted on by Bill_Hand

Will we be able to use state machines in Flow?

Thanks.

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Using flows

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Perumal 604 on at

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State machines are not available in Flow. But state machines are available in Microsoft WorkFlow Manager.

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Bill_Hand 45 on at

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Thanks. Do you know if there is any thought to include them in the future? Also, will Workflow Manager and Flow be able to work together?

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Perumal 604 on at

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Microsoft Flow is derived from Azure Logic Apps, and in Logic Apps also state machines are not available. WorkFlow Manager(WF Manager) and Flow can't work together. WF Manager is used by developers and Flow targets business users.

You can raise this as a feature request in Flow Ideas.

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Bill_Hand 45 on at

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Thank you. I did raise it as a request.

If i had say a 3 step approval workflow and needed the ability to potentially send it backwards from one approver to another, is that something that could be done in Flow without a state machine?

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patrickabel 53 on at

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Right now this is the biggest limitation preventing me from leveraging MS Flow with clients.

Microsoft Flow currently flows in a single direction (downstream) which makes it really tough to design and implement approval-driven workflows. Without state-machines, it's really not possible to "reject to a specific step" and automate a system that accounts for the real world back and forth nature of workflows.

I've considered doing this with multiple flows that conditionally change-states (by starting another workflow), but it's quite cumbersome to assemble and pass meta-data between them.

I'd love if we had a "jump to step" action that could be called based on a condition.

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sergeluca 500 on at

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here is how I implement state machines with Microsoft Flow
https://sergeluca.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/pattern-for-implementing-state-machines-with-microsoft-flow/

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