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When an item is created or modified trigger triggers the same flow multiple times

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Hi, I created a flow in Power Automate which triggers when a specific Sharepoint List is updated. My problem is when my weekly flow runs (it updates the worker list to rotate their shifts each week), it updates roughly 300 items using apply to each. And it causes to automated flow to run for 300 times. Moreover, because there are 300 concurrent flows running most of them does not complete, including the weekly flow.

I thought updating groups of items in bulk, so that automated flow would run just for 5 times. I couldn't find a way to accomplish this without using apply to each.

Another possible solution I believe is somehow limiting/conditioning the automated flow so that only the last update triggers that flow.

I attached both of my flows' screenshots, any more information needed to solve my problem would be provided upon request.

I searched vigorously to solve this problem including in this forum to no avail. If there were solutions for this either I didn't understand those or they were not applicable to my problem. Any and all help is appreciated.

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grantjenkins 11,063 Moderator on at

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What are you doing with the second flow that's triggered When an item is created or modified? Can that be done as part of a recurring flow that runs daily perhaps, picking up all items that were updated within the last 24 hours?

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Tbh, it can be configured as you suggested. In fact for now (and for the future if I can find no solutions) I recreated the flow so that it runs periodically in each 8 hours. Since actual code itself, when triggered just once, runs really fast I didn't even tried to limit to last 8 or 24 hours. But what I wish is that the flow would also be responsive to the immediate changes. It is not a must but that is what I am trying to achieve.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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And to explain automated flow more, it checks out the worker list, filters out the team leaders and updates the team leader list with their current shift values.

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grantjenkins 11,063 Moderator on at

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If you were updating a status to something like Completed (as an example), you could add a Trigger Condition, so the flow only runs if the Status is not equal to Completed. Once it's Completed, it won't even trigger the flow.

However, since you're just changing values each time, you would still need to run the flow when it changed but would then have use something like Get changes for an item or a file, and check to see if one or more specific values actually changed, and only continue if true. This would still run 300 flows if you updated 300 items, but would stop you from getting an infinite loop.

If you could do batch updates on the items (somehow) then you could look at turning off Split On (Settings on Trigger) so it bundled the changes into a single flow run (would then need to loop through each item with the flow run, so still the same number of actions - but less flow runs).

https://d365demystified.com/2021/07/13/split-on-in-power-automate-in-sharepoint-trigger-for-item-updates

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Unfortunately I am unable to find a way to batch update, I look everywhere I can. Though I am not familiar with Split On. While I do not know the backend stuff, I believe running less flows with same amount of actions would solve my problem. I believe the issue is that either the server or the license that is given to me has limits on the amount of parallel flows it can run. My bottleneck right now I assume is the amount of flows running concurrently rather than time or size of the actions.

Can you elaborate more on your first sentence, the one that mentions completed.

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