Introduction to Copy and Paste Action in Flow
Whoever was using SharePoint designer workflow and is now using Microsoft FLOW, had been suffering terribly at the lack of this feature for many long years. After ten years, the Microsoft team has succeeded in making it available in FLOW now.
This was the idea raised in April 2017 if you want to understand more history! The Flow staff worked on it over that period and finally made it available to the public.
Problem
When you are working on a very big and complex FLOW, there is always a need to replicate some of the actions because you might have conditions and switch actions where many of the steps need to be replicated with a few minor data differences. But there was no feature available so far to copy an action or set of actions and paste it at a different position in FLOW.
Solution
Yes, the feature is available now as of July 26, 2019!
The Flow team has introduced the concept of Clipboard, where you can copy an action to your clipboard. Then, while adding a new action at some different position in the same FLOW or completely different FLOW; you can use copied action from My clipboard. Let’s see it in detail.
If you login to FLOW Designer, you will notice that a new tab has been introduced called My Clipboard, this is where all your copied actions will be stored.
Let’s assume you have very big condition action where you have plenty of actions in each branch. Something like below, now you want to reuse this complete set of actions again in same FLOW. How can you do that with just one click?
Click on three dots ‘…’ ellipses icon to copy the action >> click on Copy to my clipboard, this will copy Condition actions including all actions in its branches and store it in your clipboard
Now, click on "+New Step" to add copied action >> select My clipboard tab >> you will see your copied action >> click on it. That’s it --- the whole condition action with its branches and actions in it will get created for you.
As you can see below the condition action with its sub actions are copied as is, now you just need minor data changes, as you wish.
Is it possible to copy-paste multiple actions at a time?
Yes, you can. If you want to copy multiple actions in one step, then – use "Scope" control. You can do this by adding a "Scope" control into your flow, then drag and drop all the actions you would like to copy into the Scope control. Finally, add the "Scope" to the clipboard as mentioned above.
Does copy paste works across different FLOWs?
Yes, it does. Let’s check how! Below you can see I am coping one action from Test FLOW.
I want to paste this action on other FLOW – Test FLOW2. So, I opened my Test FLOW2 designer and clicked on New Step and then selected My Clipboard >> Well I can see my copied action 😊 So yes it works across FLOW as well.
Summary
I hope all FLOW users will be very excited to see this feature now. This had been one of the most desired features which FLOW users have been asking for and it is finally here. This will save immense time now while working on big and complex FLOW projects. Thanks to the FLOW staff once again. Thanks for reading, I hope this helps.