Reminder loop not stopping when flow approved / rejected

[JimJim]

Hi Guys,

I have an approval flow and a reminder loop kicks off at the same time as my approval, it sends a reminder every 1 day. The problem I am having is that even when the approval is approved or rejected, the loop will always run once more before ending.

Here is my flow:

As you can see, when the reminder loop first starts, the Completed variable is false, only when the reminder email is sent does it pick up that the completed variable is true and it completes.

I was thinking a possible solution would be to add a condition before the reminder email gets sent to check if completed=false. But ideally I want the flow to stop immediately when it's approved / rejected as opposed to waiting until the reminder loop reaches the delay time

[tom_riha · Accepted solution]

Hello @JimJim ,

you can't stop the flow right away, if there's a 'Delay' in one of the branches then it'll wait until the end. But you could pause the parallel branch for shorter time and send reminder only for some of the runs as explained for example here: https://teylyn.com/2020/01/07/timing-microsoft-powerautomate-approval-reminders/.

[Pstork1 · Accepted solution]

Adding the condition before the email in the reminder loop will prevent the final reminder from being sent, but as you said that is only half the issue.  The loop will still keep the flow open until a full day has passed because of the delay.  There is no way to get it to exit immediately after approval, but you can improve the timing.  If you replace the delay with an inner loop with a much shorter delay, say 5 minutes, that increments a counter.  Then keep the inner loop running until the counter hits the equivalent of a day, which would be 288 5 minute loops.  Then set the counter to 288 when the approval is completed.  That way the inner loop will exit within 5 minutes, not send the final email because of the condition and then exit the outer loop because the approval is complete.

[JimJim]

Hi @Pstork1  and @tom_riha ,

Thank you both for your help, this is a great idea and I will use this method 🙂

[JimJim]

The solution mentioned above has resolved my reminder issue but I now have a new issue.

If my flow runs for more than a few minutes, it fails on the 'respond to power app or flow' action with the following error:

The execution of template action 'Respond_to_a_PowerApp_or_flow' is failed: the client application timed out waiting for a response from service. 
This means that workflow took longer to respond than the alloted timeout value. 
The connection maintained between the client application and service will be closed and client application will get an HTTP status code 504 Gateway Timeout.

Here is the screenshot:

This only started happening after I changed my reminder loop, if I reject / approve before the first reminder is sent it completes, but on the occasions I have waited until after the first reminder (5 mins for my testing) to respond, it fails with this error

[JimJim]

Please ignore my last question, I will start a new discussion