Flow returning a gateway timeout before the alloted timeout value.

[JacobOlson12344]

I'm working on a flow that uses an ai model to extract information from documents. The flow in general works fine, but I want the outputs of the flow on my local machine so I reformatted the trigger to use the http request option and send the request from a console app. Since doing this, I have been getting 504 gateway timeouts. The client request is not timing out because it has infinite timeout value (and it would be 408 in that case anyway). 

I saw some information on the forums about setting timeouts in connectors. I'm currently using connectors for the ai model as well as adobe pdf services. In both of the connectors I have set the timeout value to PT1D (1 day). still getting the same http response code.

What's odd is that it seems that the connector is still running, and is not timing out, but the flow returns the 504 early. Is there some way to set the timeout value for the flow as whole, or tell it to await the connector before returning the http response?

For reference the flow usually takes maximum 6 minutes to complete.

[JacobOlson12344 · Accepted solution]

Okay I am replying to this myself with a workaround in case others search up the issue at some point.

As far as I can tell, when you go to set the timeout on a connector step, it is only the timeout for that specific action, not for the open request that the client made (in order to trigger the flow).

I don't think you can change that timeout for the request, but I was able to work around it by making the process asynchronous. It is a setting that you can find in the response action.

What this does is it makes the process immediately respond with 202 "accepted" that tells the client app that the process will be completed in the background. The response will have a header called Location. The value of this header is a uri that will hold the flow's output once when the flow finishes. 

The way to use it then, is to get the location from the 202 response header, then repeatedly make get requests to that uri until the flow has finished (in which case the get request will get 200 - OK). The response to that get request will have all the same content that you specify in the response action of the flow.