Why We Create Multiple Similar Subflows During Migration
During your migration from UiPath, Blue Prism, or Automation Anywhere to Power Automate Desktop (PAD), you may notice that we create what appears to be the same subflow multiple times. This is intentional and serves important technical purposes that ensure your automations work correctly in the new environment.
Understanding Subflow Creation
We create subflows in PAD for three main reasons:
1. Direct Process Translation
When your original automation contains sub-processes (like UiPath workflows), we recreate these as subflows in PAD to maintain the same logical structure and organization.
2. Variable Management ("Wrapper" Subflows)
Power Automate Desktop handles variables differently than your previous platform. Sometimes we create subflows that act as "containers" to properly manage how data is passed between different parts of your automation. Think of these as translation layers that ensure information flows correctly through your process.
3. Action Translation (1-to-Many Actions)
This is where you'll most likely see what appears to be duplicate subflows. Some actions from UiPath, Blue Prism, or Automation Anywhere don't have direct equivalents in PAD. Instead, we need to combine multiple PAD actions (loops, conditions, data operations) to recreate the same functionality.
Why Multiple Similar Subflows?
Here's the key point: We do create subflows that look near identical, but the specific details always differ
When we migrate actions that are used multiple times in your original automation, each instance has different requirements:
- Different data sources
- Different variable names
- Different hardcoded values
- Different parameters
Example: Your UiPath project might use a "GetNextItem" action three times—once for a "HighPriority" queue, once for a "Standard" queue, and once for a "LowPriority" queue. While the core functionality of the activity is identical, each needs its own subflow because they're working with different queue names.
Benefits
- Accuracy: Each subflow is precisely tailored to its specific use case, ensuring your automation behaves exactly as intended
- Maintainability: If you need to modify how one instance works, you can do so without affecting the others
- Clarity: Each subflow clearly shows what it's designed to do in that specific context