Working with Power Automate Child Flows: Add a Child Flow To a Parent Flow

This article is part of the Working with Power Automate Child Flows series and of the larger 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.

With the child flow created and the run-only users setting changed, we can add the child flow to parent flows. In this article, I am going to create an example flow which prompts the user for a message which is passed into the child flow and then receives back and emails an output message from the child flow.

The parent calling a child flow, can be any type of flow, but for this example, I am creating an instant cloud flow. Do this by opening your solution and clicking New » Automation » Cloud flow » Instant:

Enter a name for the flow (I have used a naming convention of Flow Type | Flow Name | Flow Version) and Choose how to trigger a flow by selecting Manually trigger a flow; click K to continue:

To prompt the user for a message, add a text input param to the first action:

Click the add operation button and search for and select the Run a child flow action:

Select the Child Flow which should be called (make sure the selected child flow is part of the solution in which you are working or due to a limitation in Power Automate, there could be unreliable results); the dialog will include any expected input variables of the selected child flow, which I have added the variable chich is prompted to the user when the parent flow is started:

I’ve then added a Send an email (V2) action which has a hardcoded email and subject and the email body set to the child flow output variable:

The parent flow is now ready to run and we should, assuming all works well, rceive one email from the child flow with the message inout from the user and a second email set by the child flow confirming that a message has been sent.