Duplicating a Flow (with Child flows) within a Solution

[JosephGiri]

Hi everyone,

I am working within a Solution and have created a Flow (called Template Flow for Facility Booking). This flow calls on child flows within the solution.

Now that the template flow is done, I am trying to duplicate the template flow for each of the facilities (e.g Facility Booking Flow - Meeting Room A). This is needed as each facility has slightly differing booking parameters and hence has a separate Booking Form for each.

Method 1

I opened the flow and selected the Save As option. It prompted me that

"We'll create a copy of this flow and add it to your My flows page."

Choosing to save results in the error

Child Flows is only supported for Flows stored in a solution.

Method 2

I tried to export the flow, then import it but I still need to import into the My Flows page and this gives me the same error.

The template flow that I have created is somewhat complex (to me!) and I planned it such that I could simply make a copy to preserve all the process and logic. I am not looking forward to having to recreate the flow for each of my 11 facilities.

Any help would be appreciated.

[JosephGiri · Accepted solution]

I have solved this problem by basically restructuring my flows. I have essentially rewritten 15 flows to allow for the functionality I require.

Work around but not really a solution.

[packnology]

Hi @JosephGiri did you ever find a better solution to this problem? I wanted to use child flows to be able to re-use the same function between different triggers e.g. power apps from a canvas app vs. process flow trigger from a model-driven app. Within the child flows I also have some architecture for try-catch and error logging that I want to re-use between flows, and with the parent process flows I have generic functions for updating the Process Logs. Trying to "Save As" and add new instances to a solution is proving to be a nightmare, as many trigger types are not compatible with the "Add Existing" function in Solutions (they just fail to show up as available flows...!), even without the parent-child errors you originally posted about. Please share if you have any tips for how to make flow development a more efficient process.

[JosephGiri]

Sorry @packnology , I redid my flows from scratch. Haven't found a solution for this (but admittedly, i have not tried again since this post).

[Dardy]

Hi, this is an aged topic but I thought I would share another workaround.

• Open the edit page of the flow that you wish to copy
• Duplicate that tab so you have a 2nd flow in edit mode in another window/tab
• With 1st flow in edit, remove the action 'run a child flow'
  • I have compose actions to get the outcome from that child flow, I changed the compose input to an initialized variable I used in my flow. 
• Save the flow (hopefully it doesn't decide something is wrong, depending on complexity you may need to change a few more inputs to get it to save - also keep those changes in mind for when you use this copy)
• Return to the Details page of the flow you just saved and now 'Save As' and save a new copy! 
• Return to the 2nd tab and save the flow, it will restore the flow back to before you made any alterations.

Hope this makes sense and is useful to someone.

This saved me a bit of time in duplicating a flow in solutions where I had 1 child flow being used.  To be fair I have another flow I need to repeat this for that has 6 child flow actions and that may prove more troublesome.

[AndreyBear]

There is a much much much better solution using postman.  See the second accepted solution here: 
Solved: Re: Copy/Duplicate a Flow in a Solution - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com)

[tcorcor11]

Hello,

I know this is an old topic but I just stumbled across. I wrote a blog post on how to do this a while back. Maybe it is helpful for you.

https://tldr-dynamics.com/blog/copy-child-flow 

[AndreyBear]

No, that does not work given that you cannot save a flow that includees a child flow call outside a solution. There are many many other limitations to that approach. The best 100% solution we use all the time is the second one accepted as the answer here https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Flows/Copy-Duplicate-a-Flow-in-a-Solution/m-p/487546# That copy method takes 2 minutes, and works all the time.

[carolchiz]

Any news? I have a solution for managing SharePoint metadata that I want to adapt for multiple document libraries. So almost the same but some small changes. It has nested child flows.

[Gman83]

Nice solution. Microsoft must have made some changes. When I went to save the changed flow I was forced to give a new name. Other things I did were to copy to clipboard the child action I had to remove so I could easily add to the new flow.