Version History, Run History & Limitations in Power Automate Flow

Introduction

Power Automate has added new facilities for versioning and drafting in the solution cloud flows. With the help of these tools, users can store incomplete drafts of their flows and publish them later. Since the version history is kept in Dataverse, it is easy to see how each flow has changed over time. When necessary, users can see and restore earlier versions.

When you create flows in solutions in Power Automate using the new Power Automate Studio, then you will notice the new Version history option. In this post, all the information you need to get started with version history in Power Automate. how you can export the run history from the Power Automate flows.

Implementation: For using the Version History feature you need to create Cloud Flow only in Solution.

Follow the below steps

Here we are creating an “Instant Cloud Flow.”

Cloud Flow

Below, the Give window appears.

Title to your flow, and select the trigger for flow. Here I have selected “Manually trigger a flow”. Click on the “Create.” Button.

Trigger

Below, the Give window appears.

For now, flow is getting created in Classic mode.
Now add some actions in this Cloud Flow.
Here I have added a “Compose” action in the flow, with a text value in it.
Save the flow and go back to your solution.
Now the flow will open in New Flow Designer - edit this flow > Save Draft and Publish options in the new Power Automate UI
Now change the value of the “Compose” action Previous –“Test Version” Change Value “Test Version New”. Flow is saved as a draft for now.

Note. This new “Save draft” feature will help you save your flow, even if you have an error in flow.

Save draft

Once the flow has been published the flow will be running the new version as expected. It would be nice if we could manually run a flow that is saved as a draft so that we can test it before we publish it. Hopefully, that feature will arrive at some point.

Version History

Now comes the interesting bit.

How about we make some changes and we want to undo these changes? In other words, we want to go back to the previous version.

Go back to the solution and edit the same flow.
At this point, you will get a version history available.
And you can see and restore the old version also.

O/p

Run History

So, let’s see how you can download the run history.

Log in to Power automate flow and the environment. Access your flow’s history via the Run history section. This will give you data from the last 28 days.

Edit column

Navigate to the flow history page by clicking on “All runs”.

Edit flow

Run history

You will see “Get .csv file” from the top and you will get a notification once your file is ready.

Notification

Note. It may take a few minutes to generate the .csv file depending upon the amount of data.

And depending upon the triggers and actions in your flow, you will get detailed data. Some of the headers include but are not limited to.

Run start time || Run end time || Run ID || Run status || Run error message || Run link
Trigger status || Trigger method || Trigger input || Trigger output || Trigger start time

Limitations

However, there are a few limitations to writing this blog.

You can only download the first 100 runs depending upon the filter selected (all runs, successful runs, failed runs, etc). Read more here.
There is a limit on the size of content that is included in each cell of the .csv file
You will only get data for 28 days as per GDPR. Read more here.