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Manual

Use the Manual trigger when you want a flow that only runs on demand. It exposes no Business Central event hook and no schedule — the only way to start a flow with this trigger is the Run this flow action on the Flow card.

Typical examples include:

  • Smoke-testing a flow during development without firing the underlying event.
  • Giving a power user a one-click way to launch a maintenance routine (re-sync, rebuild cache, send a digest) without scheduling it.
  • Demoing a flow in a workshop where the trigger payload would otherwise be inconvenient to produce.

What happens when the flow runs​

  1. A user opens the published Flow card and clicks Run this flow.
  2. AutoFlow starts an execution immediately on the user's session — no Job Queue Entry is involved.
  3. The execution card opens so the user can watch the flow run live.

Because the trigger does not subscribe to any platform event, no background or external action will ever start it.

Configure the trigger​

There is nothing to configure. Selecting When manually started is enough — AutoFlow shows a confirmation message ("There is nothing to configure for this trigger.") and the trigger is valid as soon as the flow is published.

The Manual trigger produces no outputs. Steps inside the flow have to source their data from elsewhere (constants, HTTP calls, record reads).

Best practices​

  • Use it for flows that should never auto-start. Anything where an unintended run would be expensive (mass-email, bulk-update) is a good fit for Manual — there is no event surface to trigger it accidentally.
  • Pair with a Decision step for input. If the user needs to pass parameters, prompt them in a confirmation dialog from a Decision step, or precede the flow with a separate page that calls the Run-Flow action.
  • Don't use Manual for scheduled work. If the flow has to run periodically, use the Scheduled trigger instead — it produces a Job Queue Entry that operations can monitor and tune.