Keeping up with best practices while developing any software or building business processes is essential. It helps your team members to easily understand the developed code, make changes in your absence and as well maintain it further along. In this blog, we will see some very basic but important things to do while building Power Automate flows.
There can be two scenarios in building Power Automate flows, one where you have a small approval flow which needs less maintenance, and a second where you have a very long flow which requires a lot of maintaining, arranging of actions, etc. In both cases, it is good to have best practices in place to make your flow understandable and easy to maintain. So, let's get started.
Naming Conventions
- It is always a good practice to name your Flows with a meaningful name. In cases where you have a long flow and you would need to split the flows further into two or three flows, the naming convention is really helpful.
- Naming conventions aren't restricted to only flow names, you should also keep in mind to name your triggers and actions with proper names so that it becomes self-explanatory to the other flow reader/modifier and no extra documentation is required in this case.
Add Comments to actions
In addition to naming your flow actions, it is always advised to add comments to actions in the flow. It maintains the sanity of the flow and helps determine the actual reason for adding that action in the first place.
Grouping Actions using Scope
Sometimes when you have a very long flow and have too many similar actions, it is always good to group this kind of action using Scope. For example, when you have a set of actions that are bound to perform one task, then you should group such actions in one scope. Please note, you cannot initialize a variable inside the scope, and if you want this to have included supporting this idea.
Using expressions instead of actions
We all know the limitations of using a number of actions in a flow. Hence in large flows to avoid exceeding this limit use expressions instead of flow actions. There are many flow expression experts you will find online who can help in understanding this.
Using try, catch, and finally for error handling
It is always a good idea to know if your flow has run successfully or not. You can make use of Scope action to handle exceptions. There is a Power Automate flow template for you to get started with it.
Hope this helped someone.
Sharing is caring!