Can you set an automated flow to stop processing after 10 minutes

[skillsy]

Hi, 

   I have a flow that reads through an online Sharepoint Excel Spreadsheet looking for new entries and have filtered the List Rows present in a table to return about 60 rows that are active.

   Twice now a flow just keeps running (14 hours this time) and subsequent flows also just start running and never finish although the odd one finishes correctly. The process should run every 15 minutes so if after 10 minutes, I would like the flow to die no matter where it is up to and email us that it has failed. Is this something that can be done easily?

  Secondly DAK why this might occur. We do have three or four editors in the sheet at anytime but this was around midnight.

Thanks

[Mira_Ghaly · Accepted solution]

@skillsy 

Try the below solution at the beginning of your flow after the recurrence trigger add a parallel branch with the desired delay, Send Email and call the Terminate Action this will stops the execution of your flow.

You can change the Message and code of the Terminate Action below:

Hope this makes sense!

[skillsy]

Thank you @Mira_Ghaly  for the exceedingly well explained process however will this not fail every time at 10 minutes even if the work branch was successful?

[dennisb88]

To fix that, you should add a terminate action also below the apply to each actions. The you need to set the terminate action to succeeded.

[skillsy]

Thanks @dennisb88 and through this thread and others who know far more than me, I managed to get it working so well, I have deployed this to other key flows...

The toolkit

1. Create a boolean  variable of processingCompleted and set it to false
2. Create a branch just below this and...
3. Do all your funky Flow stuff and at the very end, set processingCompleted = true
4. The other branch, put a delay in and then check the value of processingCompleted and if it is false then you can create your warning and terminate.

I hope this helps

[adasilva]

Thanks but this will not stop the delay action. The workflow will still get "stuck" on the Delay action for 10 minutes on the right branch even though we terminated the workflow on the left branch with a Terminate action.  This logic will only avoid sending the email notification on the right side but it will not terminate the whole workflow at once. How can we stop the whole workflow at once and not just a branch?

[GUser007]

Same observation as @adasilva Doing both

1. Adding the terminate action after @Mira_Ghaly stops the flow after 15 minutes every time with "Status=Failed" even if left branch is successful

2. Adding the terminate action per @dennisb88 after the apply to each action will terminate flow with "Status=Succeeded" and the UI reports the following
a. The flow report will show "Success" and duration say "3 min"

b. After ~15 minutes, the flow report will show "Success" and duration say "15 min" - so timer was not halted

[VictorIvanidze]

Don't you think the better approach is optimizing the flow to increase its speed?

[GUser007]

Ok solved the mystery of the duration when you implement the solution above - parallel flow to terminate the flow after certain timeout. The following sample flow works well and shows proper duration

1. The happy/normal path is the left side and when completes it has a terminate normal to "stop" the right side "watchdog" path
2. The right path has to have a timer of sorts to (longer than what would normally take the right side)
3. The thing with the overall flow reported duration is that when the happy path concludes it doesn't stop everything immediately.
   1.  Instead the normal behaviour of terminate normal
      1. Lets any any running flow on the right side conclude but the output status will be cancelled. Is you have a 10 minute delay, the timer will complete the whole 10 minute but be marked as cancelled
      2. Any subsequent task will be skipped
   2. The problem is then the solution stated above will always show the full length of the delay as it would be running during normal execution
   3. A better approach is stated above with a do until loop and a small timeout happening in cycles (I made it a 6 second loop 40 times = 240 second = 4 minutes)
      1. Now when the left side completes ok, the current delay completes and then everything stops. So at most if the left side took 60 seconds then at most it will be somewhere between 60 to 66 seconds (since delay is 6 seconds)