Terminate a Flow

There are a lot of use cases when we have to terminate the Flow/Power Automate if the condition is not met OR when we have to test the flow and run just a part of it to see the results without going till the end of flow OR to end the flow correctly by declaring that it wasn’t successful instead of leaving the flow just like that.

Here the ‘Terminate’ control can be used to achieve all of this. It forces the flow to end wherever that action is placed and is executed in a branch.

The Terminate control gives us the option to set the status. We can set it to Failed, Succeeded, Cancelled, or even add a Custom Value.

If we select the Status as “Succeeded” or “Cancelled“, it will ask just for the Status Input simply.

“Cancelled” status becomes useful to differentiate between successful flows and the flow which ran successfully without serving any purpose.

This also helps when we check the “Run History” of the flow – we get to know that the flow was Cancelled coz it faced certain conditions which didn’t meet the criteria.

If you select “Failed” , it gives you option to provide error code and error message.

If you choose “Enter custom value” for Status, It will throw an error while saving the flow. Hoping that Microsoft will fix this issue soon.

Thus you can just use the 3 OOB Statuses for the time being.

Note: Terminate control will terminate the entire flow and not any specific branch .

All things considered, the Terminate action control is indeed an essential element in Power Automate. There are times when user inputs don’t meet certain conditions and we tend to leave the flow like that. This is where the Terminate action control becomes useful. We can just use the Terminate control to properly end a flow run by declaring that it wasn’t successful.

There are a lot of cool things that we can do with this control!

Also, an important thing to note is that the control “Terminate” cannot be used inside an iterative control for example “Apply To Each”

Hope it helps!

& the Power quote of the day is:

“Never try to fit in, coz you are born to stand out”