Working with Power Automate: Managing Large Flows

This article is part of the Working with Power Automate series I am writing on my experiences working with the Power Automate, which is part of the Power Platform from Microsoft. I also have a related series of articles on Power Automate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC.

While you can build a flow with as many steps as required, they will, in my experience, become more and more unwieldy the larger they become. This means the flow is both hard to navigate and difficult to maintain as you need to do a lot of scrolling and hold the structure in your mind.

There are two ways that you can make flows easier to understand and manage.

The first is through using scopes, which allows you to group steps together into logical groupings.

However, this does have it’s limitations as the steps within the workflow are still contained within the same flow, meaning you still have the same number of steps within the flow.

The second approach, and the one which I’d say forms part of the ALM (application lifecycle management) is child flows. As well as allowing you to break a flow down into multiple smaller flows, making them easier to understand and maintain, the individual child flows also become reusable so you can use them again and again without needing to create the same set of steps within every flow.

Over the next few articles of this series, I’ll run through scopes and child flows with some further explanation and examples.