Switching to the classic Power Automate Flow Designer

Although the new Flow designer in Power Automate promises some great functionality, it also brings with it some flaws, so I wanted to find an easy way to switch editors.

You might find that when creating a new Flow or editing an existing flow, you are greeted with the newer editor (version 3) which is quite a visual departure from the previous one. There are certainly some good points to the new editor:

• Version history - allowing you to roll back to previous versions of your Flow with ease
• A new expression builder and dynamic content selector - this looks to be a nice improvement on the original pop-up box which should make writing expressions and selecting dynamic content for your Flows easier
• Adding 'Initialise' actions within a Scope - When needing a few variables in a Flow, it does rather clutter up a Flow to have a lot of Initialise actions at the beginning of the Flow. While the old editor prevents putting these actions within a Scope to tidy them away, this is no longer a problem in the newer editor.

However, for now, I've had to keep reverting back to the old editor for two main reasons:

• Performance - the new editor takes longer to load and seems to consume more CPU resource, so there's always a wait when opening up a Flow
• Loss of data - this is the key one for me. On more than one occasion, parameters set within a Flow have been lost on save. This makes it hard to rely on the editor for business-critical processes.

Although the new editor has a toggle option in the upper right to switch back to the old editor:

you still have to wait for the editor to load in order to be able to make a switch. So I wondered if there was a quicker way of getting to that old editor. As some had pointed out, adding v3=false to the URL provides a link to the old editor, so we just need a way of quickly adding that to any URL; this is where a bookmarklet comes in.

What is a bookmarklet?

A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript program stored as a URL within a browser bookmark. When the bookmark is clicked, it runs the JavaScript code on the current webpage instead of navigating to a new one. In Chrome, creating a new bookmarklet is straightforward:

1. Right-click anywhere in your Bookmarks Bar and click Add Page.
2. Paste in the following Javascript code in the URL part of the dialog:javascript:(function() { var url = window.location.href; var updatedUrl = url.replace(/v3=true/g, 'v3=false'); if (updatedUrl === url) { updatedUrl = updatedUrl + (updatedUrl.indexOf('?%27) !== -1 ? %27&%27 : %27?%27) + %27v3=false%27; } window.location.href = updatedUrl;})();

   For the Name, enter whatever descriptive name you like; I tend to keep it simple with 'Classic'

3. Click Save

Now, as soon as you start to load a Flow and you see the new editor start to appear, you can just click your new Bookmarklet button and you'll be switched to the old editor without waiting for the new editor to finish loading.

Or, you can use an online Bookmarklet maker like this one where you can just paste the above code in, click Run and you'll be shown a new Bookmark, which can be dragged into your Bookmarks/Favorurites.

What does the bookmarklet do?

It's nothing fancy - if v3=true is present in the URL, it swaps it for false and if the v3 setting is not found at all, it is added in to the URL and then then that modified URL is loaded, taking you to the old editor.

Summary

Once the kinks are ironed out the newer editor, I look forward to using it, but until I can rely on it 100%, I'll be switching to the classic version every time, even though it means missing out on some of its benefits. Reliability is more important to me than the new features.