Just a quick word of caution with an issue I recently encountered while trying to develop a Power Automate – Flow.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but I was building a branch of a Flow and needed to add in a pause/delay and so I added a Delay Action. Everything worked fine.

Then my client decided that they no longer wanted a delay, so I set the delay Count (the interval) to 0 and saved my worked.

A little while longer, I received failure notices stating:

The Immediate Problem

Obviously, the immediate problem is that, apparently, you can’t set the Count value to 0.

I know, some of you are rolling your eye at me right now, why would you put a value of 0 in the first place.  In this case, the flow keeps going through mutations and I would have preferred to keep the Action in place, with a value of 0, so if the decision is made to reinstate the Delay it is simpler to do so.

Regardless, at the end of the day, the problem is simple enough to fix, either:

• Enter a positive value greater than 0
• Remove the Delay Action altogether

The Larger Issue

Sadly though, this issue brings a much larger series of problems into focus, mainly:

1. The Action is entitled Delay Action, yet the error doesn’t even mention that and instead has the word ‘Wait’
2. The editor allowed the value to be input.  Why does it not block the entry in the first place or at least flag it in red?
3. The editor allowed saving the Flow without reporting any errors.  Why is this not blocked or flagging the error.
4. From the Official Documentation site, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/power-automate/, searching for the term Delay returns no entries! (Say WHAT?!)
   Why is it so hard to locate documentation on such a fundamental action!?
5. Why is a value of 0 not allowed!  Why can’t we have no delay?
6. Why does the Action Help button not provide a direct link to that Action’s Support Documentation?

The only documentation that I’ve managed to locate was:

Learn to edit Windows recorder (V1) flows - Power Automate

You can add delays in Windows recorder (V1) flows to help control the flow run.

which was sadly of little help, just stating the obvious and not much more.  Quite typical of a lot of Microsoft’s support documentation, dreadfully inadequate!

If you use the Action Help, the first item suggested is:

Edit and refresh processes in process mining - Power Automate

Learn how to edit and refresh processes with process mining in Power Automate.

which has nothing to do with the Delay Action and doesn’t even include the word Delay or Wait.  No words!

I also tried using the Ask a Chatbot feature, that was a total disaster!  It brought forth links to subjects like:

• How to use Get Items to filter queries in SharePoint
• How to use the Send an HTTP Request to SharePoint action
• …

Where’s Microsoft In All Of This

I couldn’t tell you. After reporting several issues and almost a year later another MVP flagging the same issues and the Dev Team seemed oblivious to the problems as if they had never been reported (and yes, you know me, I forwarded all the original correspondence on the matter) I’ve simply given up reporting anything anymore as it falls on deaf ears.

Only so much fighting you can do. I prefer to focus on other things now.