Do not require attachments if condition met

[ElvirBotic]

Hello, 

I have an already existing flow when a form is submitted to run the flow for approval. It requires attachments for each submission. However, there is a question named "Emergency" which if selected i would like the attachment to not be required and still trigger my flow to run. Currently it will fail at the supporting documents step.

[eliotcole · Accepted solution]

Hi, @ElvirBotic, I'm going to assume that 'SupportingDocuements' is either a Filter or Select data action ... but it's not entirely clear, since all we can see here is the symbol.

Could you expand that step and a few of the related steps around it, then update your question with the images, please?

Purely running on the assumption above, I would say that you could run one of two options, the first of which may not be possible:

1. Trigger Conditions - Duplicate the flow and place trigger conditions in both:
   • This Flow - Ensure that there ARE attachments
   • New Flow - Ensure there are NO attachments
2. Add Logic To This Flow - Just do a little more 'logicking' in this flow

Trigger Conditions

I'm not going to get massively in to this, because there are plenty of guides, however if there is the ability within the trigger to know whether the form entry had attachments, then you could ensure that there is a flow to handle either eventuality.

Additional Logic

Below is a few steps that might help you better lay out your flow to have more of an idea of where and how things are failing. It may even mitigate that entirely, I hope! ...

1. Initialize 3 Variable Branches - Add 3 parallel branches to initialise variables at the start of the flow
   
   If you don't have that many variables just place holding actions (Compose or empty variables) in them
    
2. SupportingDocumentsArrVAR - Ensure one of the variables above is an array variable type with this name and refer to this where you would have referred to your existing SupportingDocuments action
    
   Oh and initialise it with the value:
   []
    
3. Scope VariableProcessing - Make a Scope which joins the 3 branches and name it this and inside the scope you can process setting these variables
   • Condition DecideSupportingDocuments - Make a Condition action named this which reacts to whether or there are documents attached
     • Yes - ... there are documents - ... use the current action to Set SupportingDocumentsArrVAR
     • No - ... there's no documents - ... no wuckas nothing to do here

Now your flow should have an empty array of SupportingDocuments if there are none and a full one if there are any.

---

Why Variable Branches?

The reason that I was a little prescriptive with you about laying out three parallel branches for the variables at the start is because it is just a really good practice to get in to.

Especially so when you make the action which joins them a Scope which you use to process as many of them as possible, as above. 🙂

What this will hopefully lead you to in the future is failure / error handling within your flow. Because you can then run a different set of actions if the variable processing scope fails for any reason ... or indeed any Scope containing actions.

[ElvirBotic]

Yes, I see. I appreciate the information. I explored triggers as an option. I think I will go that route and just validate if there are attachments or not for non-emergency submissions vs emergency submissions. Then I will just have another flow for Emergency submissions.