How to cope with flows timing out? Don't let it happen!

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How to cope with flows timing out? Don't let it happen!
On a recent course I was asked what happens when a Power Automate flow times out. After a bit of research, the obvious answer is to avoid this happening by changing the flow's time-out setting and then handling this in another action.

Posted by Andy Brown on 01 November 2023

In this blog

Changing your approval request's time-out settings
Running an error-handler when a flow times out
Testing your flow

So you've written a flow which waits for an approval:

The last action will only execute when someone approves the flow.

You've read somewhere that this approval will only be pending for 30 days (which is true), after which time ... what? You suspect that one answer might be to manually wait for an approval using a combination of these two actions:

How to manually wait for an approval.

However there is a really good way to solve this problem by tweaking your action's time-out settings, and then responding to a time-out event.

I got the idea for this blog from this LinkedIn page from Petter Skodvin-Hvammen (a name I can only envy, being called Andy Brown).

Changing your approval request's time-out settings

So the first thing to do is to change the settings of your approval action:

Click on the 3 dots to the right of your approval action to change its settings.

You can then choose Settings:

Choose this option.

You can now type a new time-out setting into this box:

See below for some things that you could type in.

The durations come from the ISO 8601 international standard for representing dates and times (what do you mean, you don't know this convention?). These are the abbreviations that you can use:

Code	What it represents
Y	Year
M	Month or minute, depending on context
D	Day
H	Hour
M	See above
S	Second

In addition you can prefix codes with the following letters:

Letter	Meaning
P	Start of a code representing a date and (possibly) time duration
T	Start of the time part of a code

Here are some examples of how you could represent durations of time, using these codes:

What I want to do	How I would say it
Go shopping for an hour	PT1H
Go on holiday for 2 weeks	P2W
Spend the next 1 month, 2 weeks, 3 days, 4 hours and 5 minutes writing this blog	P1M2W3DT4H5M
Wait one minute for an approval	PT1M
Wait 29 days for an approval	P29D

I'm going to use this setting initially for testing:

This will wait just one minute - I'll need to remember to change this afterwards, probably to P29D (or 29 days).

Running an error-handler when a flow times out

The second part of our jigsaw is to add a group of actions which will run only if our approval times out. First add a Scope action in a parallel branch:

A Scope action will allow you to run a group of actions if the approval times out.

You can now configure this Scope action to run after the approval times out:

Choose this option to configure your scope.

Specify that the actions inside your scope should run when the approval action times out:

Choose this option.

You could now add actions within your scope:

Typically you might send an email to yourself warning you that one of your approvals has timed out.

Testing your flow

You can now test your flow. Initially you'll see something like this:

To begin with the flow is waiting for an approval ...

But after a matter of a minute or so, this should change to something like this:

My flow timed out!

When your flow is working to your satisfaction you should remember to change the duration from 1 minute to (say) 29 days (P29D). You now have complete control over the approval process!

A further refinement might be to call a subflow within your Scope action on time-out, although to do this you will first have to put your flows into a solution. The advantage of this approach would be that it would allow you to standardise your handling of all approval time-out events.

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

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Changing your approval request's time-out settings

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Testing your flow

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