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My Flow is running every minute instead of once a week

Susan Fioribello

I have been working on my flow for a few weeks now, it has been quite the learning experience.

While I was testing the flow I had it set to run every minute so I could monitor my changes. Now that I am satisfied that it works, I reset the time interval to once a week; however, it continues to run every minute. What did I miss?

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Comments

Austen Brown

@Susan Fioribello - On the summary page for your flow, under the “28-day run history” are any of your previous runs still going? If yes, you'll need to click on the Start Date, and then in the upper right corner click “Cancel”.

If this is not the case, delete the trigger recurrence within your flow and re-add it.

Alex Wong

@Susan Fioribello
if you saved the flow, that's what it will go by. I have not seen any situation where this is a problem and i have dozens of flow triggered by schedule.

so first, like Austen said, check to make sure there aren't more incomplete (Running) flow that is “queued up” to run.

I would reload the flow editing page and make sure your trigger is still what you have in your screenshot. (in case you didn't save, or try to save but encountered an error)

Susan Fioribello

@Alex Wong , @Austen Brown - Thank you so much for your help. I did have something running and I also deleted and re-added the time trigger. It seems to have worked.

The two of you are the best! Your help in answering all of my question has been invaluable to my learning how to use this tool.

Susan Fioribello

@Austen Brown @Alex Wong

I thought I had the problem solved. The flow did not run until the trigger today (Wednesday at 4 pm) but has now been running every few minutes since then.

Any ideas why this is happening?

Austen Brown

@Susan Fioribello - Do you have any copies of the flow that might be triggering as well?

Susan Fioribello

@Austen Brown @Alex Wong
I double checked and it looks like all previous runs are cancelled, at least the cancel option is grayed out on all the previous test runs.

I copied the entire flow so I can have a version with no previous runs, and I turned off the original flow.

When I tested the new flow, it still ran every few minutes. So, I deleted the trigger and re-added it, in the new flow.

Now I have to wait until the trigger next week to see if the new flow will work without repeating every few minutes.

Alex Wong

@Susan Fioribello
I have never seen flow triggering outside of what is defined. there are going to be many possbilities on your problem, some of which Austen has mentioned, which you will need to check

while I don't think this is it, but I will say it anyway. if your flow in part of a Solution, you can invoke a “child flow” from another flow. So meaning, if you have Flow A, which is triggering on schedule (every Monday 8AM ET), within the flow, you are calling Flow B. Flow B would be a manual trigger. If Flow A calling Flow B failed, Power Automate setting on the action that call Flow B will dictates if a “retry” will happen, by default, it will retry 3x. In Flow A, you will see ONE run history, while in Flow B, you will see THREE run history.

Also, why do you have to wait until the trigger next week to see? just change your trigger to run at a set date/time that will happen in the next few minutes or hour (or next day if you want to wait longer).

Susan Fioribello

@Austen Brown

This flow continues to run every few minutes.

I have double and triple checked that no other instances are running.

I deleted and re—added the trigger.

I changed the setting on concurrency control to 1.

It seems that once this flow starts it keeps repeating. I’m starting to think it has something to do with the “for each” step. Is that possible? I started this flow from one of the templets in the Blackbaud showcase.

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Alex Wong

@Susan Fioribello
I think you have a misunderstanding on the Power Automate terminology that we have been using.

A flow trigger based on how you code the trigger to start the flow (i.e. start the flow every Wednesday at 9AM EST; start the flow when a Microsoft form is submitted, etc). Everytime a flow trigger, there will be ONE run history in the run history section of the flow detail page.

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each of the run can be clicked on (click on the date/time) to see the run history information (all action's input, output, status, etc).

Every flow has ONE trigger, but MANY actions. An action defines “what happen” next once the flow has triggered (i.e. send an email). If you are going to do more Power Automate, it will be important for you to learn some of the basic terminology used, so when asking for help, it is easier to help you.

So it sounds like your flow is not triggering every minute, rather, your flow triggered once (check the run history in the detail page of the flow), however, there are some actions in the flow that is done in a LOOP (for each loop), which I'm going to assume it is the send email action (you get many emails and think the flow triggered multiple times).

So to help you, first you need to point us to the template you were working from. Then it is to let us know what you are trying to achieve with the flow (i.e. 1 email per gift? 1 email per “set” of gift? or 1 email for the entire flow run).

Susan Fioribello

@Alex Wong

The terminology has been a bit confusing. I must admit that I would really like to have a book the explains some of the basic concepts. I have been spending a lot of time watching videos and searching for videos for beginners but none of them explain the philosophy or logic just tell you the next step. You and @Austen Brown have been tremendously helpful!

I started with the Daily gift digest notification flow shared by Trevor Kelly in 2021. I found it in Blackbaud's Microsoft Power Platform Template Showcase. Sharing my Power Automate Flow: Daily Gift Digest Notification - Blackbaud Community

Essentially, I want to send one email every Wednesday afternoon with a list of all gifts received the prior week in descending gift amount order.

At the moment I have it linked to a gift list in RE NXT this is basically just pulling that list.

Here is a list of all runs:

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When I add the filter for just running it says there are no runs. Last week, when I let the flow start from the natural trigger (Wednesday at 4 pm) it started fine and sent me the email with the gift listed in descending gift amount order. It then continued to send me an email every 3 or 4 minutes until 10:38 AM Thursday morning. Over 100 emails. There were 145 gifts so this made me wonder if I have a loop that is causing it to send one email for every gift instead of one email if there is at least one gift.

Austen Brown

@Susan Fioribello - Would you mind sharing an export of your workflow? On the summary page of your flow, click “Export” > “Package (.zip)”. Complete the fields on the new screen and download a copy, attach it to your reply here. That'll enable us to take a look at the set up for the flow and provide additional feedback/advice.

Susan Fioribello

@Austen Brown -

Here is the export of my flow. Hopefully, I did this correctly ?

SusanShebarFioribello_20240424201256.zip

Alex Wong

@Susan Fioribello
Your flow has been changed from the original post you used in such a way that cause it to no longer do what Trevor Kelly post meant to do.

Trevor post's flow:

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after Listing gift (action named Pull Recent Gift list from RE NXT), it is conditioning to see if there are any gift to work on, if YES, then add each gift into a variable. THEN create the HTML table that shows the gifts and send it out in ONE email.

This is yours:

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You have a For each action BEFORE the condition to check if there are any gift to work on, that's doesn't make sense in the flow. THEN within the For each action, you have the same For each gift action like Travor has it. Meaning now what you flow is doing is looping TWICE.

Assuming there are 10 gifts in the list gift:

Travor will have ONE loop that loops through each of the 10 gifts to gather info, and put into a variable that stores the 10 gifts to send in ONE email.

your flow will have a LOOP in a LOOP. Meaning, you are going to loop 100x in total, and send an email out every 10x. Your first email will have the “real” 10 gifts. 2nd email will have the “real” 10 gifts but an additional SAME dup 10 gifts. 3rd email will have 30 gifts, so on and so forth.

Not to mention you have another For each 1 action that loop gift splits array, which is yet another problem.

So to answer your question directly, your flow did not trigger multiple times PER minutes. Your flow triggered ONCE only at the time you specified it to run. Your flow send out X number of emails, where X is the number of gifts returned by the gift list action. (if you got 100 gifts, you will get 100 emails, 200 gifts = 200 emails).

Your flow can be fixed, but will be A LOT of typing that won't be good to do here in reply. Suggestion is for you to either discard this flow and download Trevor's flow zip file again and import it to have a fresh start. OR go to the next monthly Power Automate user group and we can directly you to fix your flow then.

Susan Fioribello

@Alex Wong

That makes a lot of sense. I was thinking it might be something like that. I am going to try to write something using this as a reference. I think I understand much more now than when I started working on this.

How do I find out about the monthly meetings? I'd love to join the monthly meetings.

Alex Wong

@Susan Fioribello

Austen Brown

@Susan Fioribello - If you're not registered to attending BB's virtual developer's conference in June, I highly recommend attending that as well. There will be a wide variety of sessions for 'citizen developers' (folks like you and me), at any skill level. There is a free registration option.

Susan Fioribello

@Austen Brown

Thank you. I will take a look at this.

Susan Fioribello

@Alex Wong

Thank you. I registered and joined the email list.