MS Flow 30 Day Limit

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Posted on by PriyaFernandes

Hi,

I can see lot of post on MS flow 30Day limit but not clear how it works.

If I have 3 levels of approval in a flow and each of them take 15days to approve an request, then does the flow run for 45 days or the flow terminates after 30days?

My organization has multiple levels of approval which may take more than 30days.

Thanks

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efialttes 14,756 on at

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Hi!

Maximum duration of a Flow execution is 30 days, meaning when the threshold is reached the logic timeouts. LogicApps, Power Automate elder brother, has a higher limit. This means for long-time approvals you should avoid to concentrate your logic in a single flow, but rather use at least several flows.

GReat stuff here

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/april19/microsoft-flow/increased-run-duration

Hope this helps

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PriyaFernandes 34 on at

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Hi @efialttes,

Thanks for your quick response.
When i contacted ms support team they mentioned that flow would run for more than 30days. Only if the flow is inactive for more than 30days eg. after the first approval, if the second approver doesn't respond for 30days, then the flow terminates reaching the limit.

So which statement is correct?

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efialttes 14,756 on at

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Assuming your multilevel Approval strategy is based on a single Flow i.e. it is not splitted in several ones, seems there is a misunderstanding.

As you can see in the official doc link I shared:

"Currently, flow runs time out after 30 days, causing any pending steps (like approvals) to time out as well. While this isn’t a problem for most approvals, there are cases where responding to an approval can take longer than 30 days"

Hope this helps

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PriyaFernandes 34 on at

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@efialttes Ok, So the run duration for my original example will be 45days?

Eg: If I have 3 levels of approval in a flow and each of them take 15days to approve an request, then does the flow run for 45 days or the flow terminates after 30days?

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efialttes 14,756 on at

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Hi again!

My experience is,

If you implement the 3 level approval level in a single flow instance, once it starts execution it will stop after 30 days, so if each single approval lasts for 15 days you will not complete the 3-level approval process.

If you implement the 3 level approval in 3 flows instances (1 approval level per flow), and each single approval lasts for 15 days, you will succeed.

That's why I recommended the official documentation link shared above explaining a way to overcome the 30 days limitation by applying a multi flow instance strategy

Please give it a try, and let us know your progress

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efialttes 14,756 on at

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@PriyaFernandes
Please note there is a way to handle long time approvals and override the 30 days limit. Good stuff here:
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Community-Blog/Build-long-running-Approval-Flows/ba-p/279890
So if you currently handle a three step approval in a single flow, yuo should split it in four flows: Flow#1 requests approval#1, Flow#2 is executed when reponse to approval#1 is received and requests approval#2, Flow#3 is executed when response to approval#2 is received and requests approval#3, and finally Flow#4 is executed when response to approval#3 is received
Hope this helps

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