Pause a Flow using Delay and Delay Until | Power Automate

In some use cases, you want to pause a Flow either by a duration you specify or until the timestamp you specify.

Let’s look at both the ways – Delay and Delay Until in Schedule operation

Delay

In a simple application, you can make a Flow wait for a certain duration by using the Delay Action in Time

And I’m selecting a standard 3 min wait

And it will pause the execution until then

And resume the Flow after the Delay duration has been completed

Delay Until

Now, a variation to pausing a Flow until the timestamp you specify is achieved using Delay Until action the timestamp you specify
In my example, I’m using a Timestamp stored in a Time variable and the value is something like below

So, I can use the Delay until action and it accepts a TimeStamp. It accepts ISO8601 format.

And I’ll set a value, which contains my timestamp

In my case, based on the Timestamp stored in my variable, it’ll wait until the below shown time.

And will be completed when the timestamp is hit

And that’s it.

Here are some more posts that might help you –

Hope this helps!!

Text Functions in a Flow | Power Automate

June 9, 2020 priyeshwagh777 Power Automate Microsoft Flow, microsoft power automate, Power Automate, text functions

As I was looking at some String/Text operations in Flow recently, here’s what I discovered.

Looks like there are a lot more to come, so let’s look at some initial ones.

Find text position

A pretty simple feature to find the position the Search Text starts from in a String.

Here, I’m trying to find where does ‘yes’ in string ‘Priyesh’ starts from in the given text. And the answer was 3. [Text Index starting from 0]

If the text doesn’t exist, the result is -1

Substring

Here’s another important Text function called Substring.

This will return the substring with starting index of 3 and the length of the string from the starting character.

In this case, it’ll return the string “yes”

If your Starting Position in Substring is out of the range i.e. exceeding the length of the entire string, you’ll see and error like below stating the issue.
Also, the same error will be displayed if the Length of the Substring chosen falls out of range i.e. the index exceeding end of the string.

Here are some more Power Automate / Flow posts you might want to look at

Implementing Exit app, Logout and Confirm Exit features in a Canvas Power App

May 24, 2020February 9, 2021 priyeshwagh777 Microsoft PowerApps microsoft power automate, Power Platform, powerapps

Most common scenarios are where you need users to be able to Exit the Canvas Power Apps in the below ways –
Scenario – Let’s say you put a close button somewhere in your App.

Exit the current App but stay logged-in to Power Apps.
Exist and Logout Power Apps entirely.
In both above cases, ask user for confirmation before exiting.

So let’ look at these scenarios one by one –

Exit from current App

Now, let’s say you’ve put a Close button on your App like this. And when you click it –
It takes you to the App selection screen in your Power Apps
You can implement this using Exit() method on OnSelect property of the Close button as shown below

And that’s it.

Exit and Logout of Power Apps

Another variation to the same feature would be to Exit the App as well as Logging out completely. Now, I’ve put a Lock button here to represent Logout.
You can implement this by using Exit(true) method as shown below
And, it will logout the PowerApps Application itself.

And you’ll need to log in all over again.

Confirm before Exit

This is a feature that will work with both, Exit() and Exit(true). It will ask you for a confirmation on whether if you really like to close/logout the app?

Select App in the left-hand Tree view, select App
And look at the right hand Properties menu – The Confirm exit and Confirm exit message will let you enable this feature with the message you want to display –

And you can set your message
And then, when you either Logout or try to Close the App, you’ll be prompted with this message

Note: For all the changes to take place in Canvas Power App, make sure all changes are Published and you force close and re-open the Power App (if using on a mobile device / Tablet). Wait for a few seconds to get notified about the latest version being available.

And it’s all that simple! In case you are looking for more articles on Canvas Power Apps, you might want to check these below –

Hope this helps!

Setting Retry Policy for an HTTP request in a Flow | Power Automate

April 19, 2020April 19, 2020 priyeshwagh777 CRM with .NET Web Applications, Microsoft Flows, Power Automate http request in flow, Microsoft Flow, microsoft power automate, retry policy

Often times, There could be an issue where your HTTP request isn’t hitting well. So, to overcome this, you might want your Flow to Retry after a certain duration and for some number of times.

You want to setup a Retry policy for the same. Here’s how you do it!

Setting Retry Policy

Follow this to setup a Retry Policy of your Flow

Locate your HTTP step and navigate to Settings

Once you’re in Settings pane, scroll below and look for Retry Policy.

Default type is set by default, if you expand it, you can select what should be the Retry Type. In this example, I’ve set to Fixed Interval for simplicity
Default is set to 4 retries at an exponential interval. (Exponential increment type is a little confusing to explain, you can check this post as users discuss how exponential time increments work – )