Fixing the flaws of Flow

In a previous post I complained about Flow not being able to compress files on the go. The issue with that was that as my files were not stored locally by default, once I started the archiving process with 7zip it would first cause the download of the file locally, then add it to the archive. Often with a flaky network something would disrupt the download, which would then mess up with the archive. The workaround has been to specify that all the files in that folder are stored locally, thus decoupling the download from the archiving.

I know, not something to write home about. Let's look at the config of the HTTP component in more detail. Oops! There is an automatic decompression button set to 'On' by default! Make sure it's off unless you really want decompression.

As I had a few failed runs, I've changed the retry policy, from the exponential default starting with an interval of seconds, to a fixed interval with quite a few minutes interval. I find this works better for a website that has gone temporarily down, especially given that I don't particularly want the flow to be responding in real time. The fact that this can be done from inside the config rather than by adding more steps to the flow is something I learned from the great Serge Luca in his Sharepoint Saturday presentation.