Is there an way to create a delay between 2 steps?

Hey all,

Currently building a flow that pulls from Webflow, enriches through an API to generate an image then push that image back into the Webflow collection item.

Issue is that the POST request takes a couple of seconds to generate the image and return the URL I need. By that time the flow has finished. Any ideas?

Thanks!

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Hey Tom!

I’m probably going to get some flak from our infrastructure engineers for helping you with this one. In general, no there is not a way to do that. We try to avoid waiting as much as we can.

That being said, this is sometimes needed! So you could use another API Enrichment call that takes some amount of time, and then make the request to the get your images.

If there was some sort of API that has a guaranteed a wait time, that could be used. Something like this:

http://slowwly.robertomurray.co.uk/delay/3000/url/http://api.kanye.rest/

Which will wait 3 seconds and then give you a quote by Kanye West. The 3000 in the URL can be adjusted to the number of milliseconds to wait. It tops out at 10 seconds, but try to keep it low to be kind to our servers!

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Hello i am trying to implement this same, i have a connected flow, but sometimes i reach an API cal limited, so i would like to wait 5 seconds before continuing to the next step or connected flow

thanks
Anto

Hey @ANTONY_RAPPAI ,

I’ve built something similar to what you’re describing for several clients.

Can you describe in a bit more detail what you’re trying to do?

For a couple of my clients, the system shown below works well. I have a bunch of data I want a Parabola flow to process, but it can’t do it all at once (for reasons related to the specific APIs used).

So, I have the Parabola flow process a bunch of the data, then update a Google sheet cell which serves as a placeholder variable. Ie, if the placeholder variable equals 100, the Parabola flow will process rows 100 - 200, then update the variable to 200, so that the next time it runs, it will process rows 200 - 300, etc. etc.

But then, I don’t want to have to manually wait for the flow to run, wait 5 minutes, and then run it again.

So, I use a Zap or Integromat scenario which is also triggered by the same Parabola flow. That Zap receives the webhook trigger from the Parabola flow, delays for some time, and then re-triggers the same Parabola flow (also via webhook).

That all looks something like the below. Hope that can be helpful - if you give a few more details, I might be able to offer a more specific solution.

Hi Brian, can you send you a video privately, i don’t want to share a whole bunch of our student data on this public thread.

Thanks
Anto

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Hey @ANTONY_RAPPAI ,

Yeah, no problem. Go ahead and DM me.