Turn a flow off and NOT have runs queued?

[juliea]

I've seen the article Turn flows on or off - Power Automate | Microsoft Docs and the note that says "If you turn a off a flow, its runs are queued and they'll run when you turn the flow on". I've read that this is "...an important feature to avoid data loss -- this allows you to temporarily disable a flow, make corrections, and then enable the flow, running it over all of the events that happened in the interim. Without this functionality all of those business critical events would be lost.", but this is 5 years old.

My issue is that the reason I turn the flow off for a period of time is because I don't want the flow to be triggered - I may be working on an issue or importing things and don't want people to get emails generated from the flow. In this scenario, having the runs queued defeats the purpose of being able to turn it off. There is no issue of data loss in this scenario.

How to work around the "feature"? Should I copy the flow and create a new one that doesn't know about the queued runs? then delete the old flow?

[RezaDorrani · Accepted solution]

Hi @juliea 

This is by design.

An option would be to turn off the flow.

When ready to turn on, export the flow, delete the current flow & create a new flow using the exported flow.

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[rgentile]

While I can see times when Flow runs being queued would be beneficial, I agree with @juliea that having Flow runs queued defeats the purpose of being able to turn the Flow off.  

In my case, I'm working on a new version (Ver3) of a live Flow (Ver2).  Ver3 was created by copying Ver2 so both Flows have the same trigger.  Ver3 was off while I was working on it then when I turned it on to test, all the Ver2 runs that were queued ran which caused a bunch of duplicate data. 

@RezaDorrani, thanks for the suggested workaround.  On a side note some of your videos on Power App data grids using SharePoint lists were very helpful to my team.

@Microsoft it sure would be a lot simpler if we could just turn Flow run queuing on/off.

Thanks

[rgentile]

Here is another possible workaround that uses a Trigger Condition:
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Community-Blog/Flow-with-quot-When-an-item-is-cre...

[rgentile · Accepted solution]

We found it easiest to just add a Terminate action immediately below the trigger.  This allowed the queued runs to execute while preventing the rest of the Flow actions from executing.  Once the queued runs ran we just removed the Terminate action.

[jerinke]

An easy way to temporarily turn off a flow is remove any existing trigger conditions (we save them in a Compose so they are handy later), set the trigger condition to @false.  When you want to turn the flow on again, remove the @false and restore the previous trigger conditions.

[rgentile]

Clever. 🙂  So, @false as the trigger condition prevents the Flow from continuing to execute while not having to turn the Flow off so runs don't get queued, right?

[jerinke]

Correct.  Since the flow isn't really turned off, there is no "queue".  The trigger condition is saying, "only run if @false is true" and that will never happen.  So the flow doesn't run, there is no queue, and when you want it to run you simply replace the trigger condition.

[rgentile]

Thanks for the confirmation on how your suggestion works and for taking the time to share your solution with your fellow developers.

[Vishnu181296]

In the case of a push trigger, such as when a Power Apps button is clicked, does the que not occur?