We are excited to announce a new set of Serial Loop operators in Workflows that support up to 1,000 iterations per loop. With these operators, you can process large lists one item at a time and repeat steps until a condition is met without hitting the 250-item limit of today’s ParallelLoop operator.
What you need to know
The new loop operators run in serial (one iteration after another). They do not replace the existing parallel Loop operator (250-item cap) - both will be available.
Serial loops support up to 1,000 iterations per loop.
This release includes the following new features:
For Loop: iterates once for each item in a data set.
While Loop: iterates while a user-defined condition is met.
Break Operator: exits a loop early (for example, on first success or first failure).
Existing parallel Loop operators in your workflows keep working and are not converted.
Problem
Today, Workflows only supports parallel loops with a 250-item cap. Customers building bulk identity updates, paginated API consumption, and retry-style flows have told us they need:
Higher iteration counts than 250 items.
Serial (one-at-a-time) execution instead of parallel, to reduce memory/load and to keep ordering predictable.
A way to repeat until a condition is met (e.g., “retry create until it succeeds,” “loop while there is a next page”).
Without these, customers either split work across multiple workflows, build custom retry logic outside Workflows, or simply can’t automate the use case at all.
Solution
This release delivers four main value drivers:
Process larger lists, in order: Use a For Loop to iterate over up to 1,000 items in serial. This can be used for things like bulk identity updates and other use cases that exceed today’s 250-item parallel Loop.
Repeat until a condition is met. Use a While Loop with a defined condition to iterate until success, loop while there is more data, or stop as soon as something changes. Combine with Break to exit early on a success or first failure.
Love this new functionality - I assume the documentation won’t be updated until the production rollout date? I was hoping to find out whether the serial loops have this same behavior as the existing parallel loop:
“Later actions and operators in the workflow can begin before the loop step has finished iterating over all objects in the list. However, the workflow itself can’t end until the loop has finished executing. For this reason, adding additional steps outside of the loop between the Loop operator and the end step is not recommended.”
Will a serial loop hold up steps that are outside of the loop between the loop and the end step, or will the rest of the workflow still process while the serial loop is still iterating?
Hey @MattUribe You are correct. We’ll be publishing documentation when we roll out to production.
Will a serial loop hold up steps that are outside of the loop between the loop and the end step, or will the rest of the workflow still process while the serial loop is still iterating?
For Serial Loops, the workflow will pause/wait for the loops to complete before processing the rest of the workflow
Hi, has this been rolled out to Sandbox tenants yet please or when is it scheduled to? I can see May 11th it was meant to roll out but can’t see it in my tenants as of yet. Thanks
Hi Takato, thank you for this I can see it. Is the Break Operator not included as of yet as I can see on that one you can do first success or first failure but this looks to be not currently available.
