As part of the Flow design process, I often end up building in some debug actions like Send email, Set variable etc. to capture/troubleshoot values that in turn help along with the actual design. But I’d want to retain those actions for debugging later rather than recreate them. Also when building/designing complex Flows I need to find failing actions and test or disable subset of actions.

Issue

Ideally, you want to be able to deactivate or skip a specific action or set of actions. Microsoft Flow does not have this feature available at this point of time. This requires you to either create a copy of the flow for testing purposes or debug by deleting actions only to realize later that those actions you just deleted weren’t causing the issue. This means you’ll need to re-configure those actions from scratch to restore your Flow design which can be time consuming.

Resolution

Below are two approaches I’ve used and found useful for disabling/skipping actions for testing and debugging purposes.

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