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Flow did not terminate and I can't cancel it

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Posted on by SL-21111327-0

I have two different flows for two lists in SharePoint set up almost identical. If we receive a response, the flow should terminate immediately. Otherwise, it moves on to the parallel branch and checks for responses and sends reminder emails.

Example of it working correctly:

However, today I see all the runs that show as Succeded and show the terminated action completed successfully but the counter is still active on the parallel branch. We do not want those reminder emails going out because they have already responded. The cancel button is grayed out on all of these runs.

What would have caused this and how else can this be cancelled?

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Pstork1 69,556 Most Valuable Professional on at

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The fact that its a parallel branch and not a branch based on a condition means it will always run. When doing an approval with reminders you need to put some kind of a check in the reminder branch to finish it up when the approval is completed. Please Note: that any delays you put in the reminder side will still need to finish before the branch completes. So for this kind of flow I normally use a counter with an outer and inner loop in the reminder. The inner loop has a short duration. That way when the approval is complete I can max out the counter so it checks for the completion of the approval after the next loop.

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SL-21111327-0 11 on at

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Thanks Paul! That makes sense. Looks like the parallel branch finally got cancelled. Just took about an hour before that happened. I've never noticed it takes one hour to cancel that branch once a response is received, but upon reviewing my first screenshot there and then a few of my other successful runs in my other flow, it seems that's how it has always worked (it just takes an hr for some reason). I appreciate your response though. Definitely some good insights to have when setting up these type of flows.

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David_MA 14,956 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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If the row you have highlighted in your screen shot is the one you are trying to cancel, the reason you cannot cancel it is because the flow run has completed. You can only cancel flows that are running. In this screen shot you posted:

The terminate action ended the flow with succeeded. While the icon of the delay action may appear that it is running, it is not as it ends when the flow was terminated. It still shows running since that was the status of the action at the time the flow was ended by the terminate action.

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