Creating a Flow to set record image

Due to my interest in motorbikes, and being a keen biker (as touched upon previously), obviously one of my PowerPlatform/D365 environments is based around motorbikes! I mean, why not….

My aim is to have a list of motorbikes, and be able to distinguish them by make, model, and type. This is going to form the basis of various things that I’m minded to test out in the CDS with PowerApps and Flow, which I’ll be blogging about on a semi-regular basis.

Having the list of data is obviously necessary. Then it occurred to me – I should be saving an image for each motorbike against its record.

So there’s a default field available in every entity for an image. This is the little icon that displays next to the record name at the top left of the form when you open it:

There’s only ONE image field available for each entity – which makes sense, after all.

Now, this can be manually added to the record by manually uploaded. That’s a pain though – surely there’s a BETTER way to do this…and what could be better than using Flow!

So I started to create this, and see how it would work. Thanks to Mike Carlton for his amazing support with this.

The aim is to have a URL to a picture that the system will then automatically go out to retrieve.

The first Flow that we created did this by getting the URL, saving the image to OneDrive, and then taking that image and uploading it into the CDS record (we’re not touching D365 at all here)

After tweaking one or two of the parameters (the finished Flow is shown above), it ran successfully! High fives all around.

Looking further at it, I wondered if it would be possible to remove the stage where the image file was saved to OneDrive. I played around with it further, and lo and behold – it was indeed possible!:

This is now working very nicely, and I’m quite happy with it. More to come!