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How Do You Create a Nested Flow in Power Automate?

Published in Power Automate 3 mins read

You can create a nested flow in Power Automate by using the "Apply to each" action. This action allows you to iterate over a collection of items, such as a list of emails or a table of data. Within the "Apply to each" loop, you can add other actions, including another "Apply to each" action, which creates the nested flow.

Here's a breakdown of how to create a nested flow:

Step 1: Create the Main Flow

  1. Start by creating a new flow in Power Automate.
  2. Add an action that retrieves the data you want to iterate over. This could be a "Get items" action for SharePoint lists, a "List rows present in a table" action for Dataverse, or any other action that returns a collection of data.

Step 2: Create the "Apply to each" Action

  1. Add an "Apply to each" action after the data retrieval action.
  2. Select the output from the previous action as the "Value" for the "Apply to each" action. This tells Power Automate to iterate over each item in the collection.

Step 3: Create the Nested Flow

  1. Within the "Apply to each" loop, add another "Apply to each" action. This will create the nested flow.
  2. Select the appropriate output from the previous action as the "Value" for the nested "Apply to each" action. For example, if you're iterating over a list of emails, and each email has a list of attachments, you would select the "Attachments" output as the value for the nested loop.
  3. Add the desired actions within the nested "Apply to each" loop. These actions will be executed for each item in the nested collection.

Example: Processing Nested Data

Let's say you have a list of orders in SharePoint, and each order has a list of items. You want to process each order and its items separately.

  1. Create a flow that uses the "Get items" action to retrieve the list of orders from SharePoint.
  2. Add an "Apply to each" action to iterate over each order.
  3. Within the first "Apply to each" loop, add another "Apply to each" action to iterate over the items within each order.
  4. Add actions within the nested loop to process each item, such as sending an email or updating a database record.

Practical Insights:

  • Nested flows are useful for working with complex data structures that have multiple levels of information.
  • You can use nested flows to perform repetitive tasks on different levels of data.
  • Power Automate provides various actions that can be used within nested flows, allowing you to customize the flow based on your specific needs.

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