When you fire up a child workflow in classic workflow, it’s always asynchronous. Fire and forget. Sometimes it’s what you need, sometimes you want to insist on child finishing their greens before the dessert, so to speak.

Power Automate, on the other hand, always wants the result when you call a child flow and nags you about it:

But what if you don’t want to wait? What if you want start a child flow but really don’t care about the result?

Output action (either Respond to a PowerApp or flow or Response) is usually the last one in the child flow, kind of a return statement. But it does not have to be – you can include this action as one of the first steps in the child flow. You can even add the output in case you need to tell your parent something like “I’m going to get some milk, back in 3 days”.

The child will execute that respond action and move onto the subsequent steps as if nothing has happened. Everyone’s happy.

Cover image Fire and forget missile / CC BY-SA