Metadata behaviour with solutions

Let’s start with a definition:

Metadata is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data

Crystal clear, right? Well, to anyone who’s unfamiliar with the concept of metadata, this is probably NOT so clear.

So what is metadata? Well, the way that I like to describe it is as a set of data that contains information about something. So for example, if I were describing a car, the metadata could be:

Manufacterer
Model
Colour
Engine size
etc

When it comes to Power Platform, the metadata is referring to the solution structure, ie tables, columns (& column types), etc. Essentially it describes the solution, but doesn’t hold any data that’s entered by users. In fact, we could describe the entire solution file as metadata, which we build & then deploy to downstream environments!

However, the solution metadata isn’t just describing the tables included in the solution, the columns etc. It also describes (& defines) the actual attributes, such as the table type, whether duplicate detection rules are activated or not, etc.

Now, when creating a new table, the metadata is created automatically for us – we don’t need to do anything about it (well, apart from setting it as we may wish it to behave). When importing a table into a solution, however, we get the lovely option to include metadata or not:

As we’re going to see, this is actually quite an important little item to be aware of.

See, if we don’t include the table metadata, we can still set the table properties within the solution. So what is the problem then? Well, there is actually an underlying challenge, which we found out about this week.

We were developing a solution for a customer, which included some standard tables (eg account, contact, etc). We added these into our (custom) solution, though on adding, we did NOT tick the ‘Include table metadata’ option.

We went ahead with creating our custom columns, forms, views etc, all normal sort of practise. However, one of the business requirements stated that auditing needed to be present. Well, there’s a standard table audit functionality available in Power Platform, so we went ahead & selected this in our custom solution:

OK – all is looking good. We finished with the development, and started to go through the ALM process.

On importing the solution to UAT, we couldn’t see any auditing going on (yes, we made sure to enable auditing in the environment settings!). Looking at the solution in UAT, the table did NOT have the auditing flag set for it.

This was quite puzzling. We went back to the DEV environment, and sure enough, the auditing flag was set there. However it obviously wasn’t going through to the UAT environment.

Opening up the actual solution file exported from DEV gave us a surprise. Though we had set the auditing value in it, it wasn’t actually included in the XML:

This was quite puzzling. We decided to try again from the begining with adding the table to the solution, but also setting the ‘Include table metadata’ flag when doing so. We went through the process again of exporting the solution and opening up the file to inspect it. This time, the table audit value WAS present (along with a lot of other metadata values as well):

This was, to be honest, a little annoying. We specifically didn’t want to bring in all the table metadata, as we could potentially affect another setting.

Reaching out to Microsoft, we sought clarification on the behaviour of this. They very nicely came back to provide further information.

At the moment, the behaviour is such that if a user doesn’t include the table metadata when adding it to a solution, it doesn’t matter if the user sets any attributes/values within the solution.

There is a single flag to say whether or not all metadata of a table should be exported or skipped when a solution is exported. This will include ALL includes all attributes ‘about’ the table – display name, description, audit flags, etc. It is quite extensive (for more information on all of the metadata options, please visit EntityMetadata EntityType (Microsoft.Dynamics.CRM) | Microsoft Learn)

If we have a need to modify/change metadata behaviour, we have to set the ‘Include table metadata’ flag. At this point in time, it’s NOT possible to select which metadata we want to include – it’s all or nothing. Now, that’s not to say that this may not change in the future – I can definitely see a need for this, and have fed this back into the Microsoft team accordingly.

I’m hoping that this will come about at some point to allow selective metadata inclusion within the solution, as I think it will be of great benefit to developers!

Has this scenario ever tripped you up before? Do you have scenarios that having selective metadata options would benefit you? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Power Platform ALM Changes

As a starter for 10, if you haven’t yet looked into ALM for Power Platform, you should most definitely be doing so! ALM is, of course, Application Lifecycle Management. This is how, in a nutshell, we move solutions between environments.

In the good old days, this was done manually of course (CRM 4.0, I’m looking at you!). Today, though it is of course still possible to export/import solutions manually, it’s not the Microsoft Best Practise method. Doing it manually also means that it’s unlikely that you’ll have appropriate source control for your solutions too, which let’s face it, isn’t the best.

Want to look at a previous solution version? Hmm – do you still have it saved on your machine or not?

So we should generally know why we’d want to use ALM. But which tooling do we actually use for it? Going back to the on-premise days, there was TFS (or Team Foundation Server, to give its full name). This was a full source control respository, allowing developers to check in/check out code, built solutions, deploy them, etc.

With the move to ‘cloud based systems’, the TFS replacement is Azure Dev Ops (or ADO, as it’s usually referred to as). ADO works in essentially the same way as TFS did (some differences, but they’re not really relevant here), but does so through the cloud.

When it comes to Power Platform solutions, ADO uses the ‘Power Platform Build Tools’ capabilities to hook into Dataverse & pick up solutions. The tools essentially gives ADO the ability to connect in to a Power Platform environment, build/export solutions, deploy solutions, etc.

More information on the toolset can be found at Microsoft Power Platform Build Tools for Azure DevOps – Power Platform | Microsoft Docs

Now there are some limitations to the Power Platform Build Tools. In fact, I’d be so bold as to say that currently they’re not in a fully mature state. It’s not possible to do everything that you can manually (well, not with the inbuilt capabilities – there are some ‘hacks’ around that can extend them). At the moment, it’s essentially 1.0.

Well, Microsoft is announcing that they’re now releasing 2.0 of the Power Platform Build Tools this week!

In fact, this is so new that at the time of writing, there’s no Microsoft Docs available for this! So what does version 2.0 bring, and why is Microsoft releasing a new version?

So Microsoft has actually had this in planning for a while. There’s a lot going on with GitHub, as we well know, and Microsoft wants to drive the consistency of the experience for users forwards. At the moment, they work in somewhat different ways, and the aim is to bring this to parity.

The main change that the new version has is that instead of tasks being PowerShell based (which they are currently), now the tasks will be Power Platform CLI based. So Microsoft is changing the underlying working method from PS to CLI. Some of us will, of course, already be familiar with the way that the CLI works, and it’s really nice to see that the capabilities will now be part of ADO.

Now don’t start worrying that your current ADO pipelines (v0) will suddenly stop working. Microsoft is not doing anything with v0 at this point in time (though they may potentially deprecate in the future). So all of your existing ADO pipelines using the Power Platform Build Tools will continue to work, but no new features are going to be being released for it.

In terms of switching to using v2, it’s really quite simple – you’ll need to change the task version type as so:

If you are currently using YAML (as so many wonderful developers do) to author pipelines, you’ll need to do the following in the YAML code:

It’s very important to note that it’s not possible to mix and match task versions. If you do this, the ADO pipeline will fail, so please don’t try this!

I’m really excited about this, and to see that the CLI capabilities are being brought into play for ADO capabilities. I’ll admit that I’m wondering what else will be being released (in the fullness of time), as I’m sure that this is just the start of some great new stuff!

One of the things that I’m REALLY hoping for is the ability to use ADO pipelines to be able to migrate Power App Portals (or Power Pages), as currently it’s only possible to do using the Power Platform CLI, or the Configuration Migration Tool. It would be amazing to be able to do these with ADO pipelines as well!

Canvas Apps & Power Automates

So it’s been a busy few weeks here, which is why I haven’t really been putting up any articles. March/April is always a busy time for our family with stuff going on, and this year I decided not to push myself to get articles out, as otherwise I’d be running very low on sleep!

That being said, I’ve still had some great ideas about things that I’d like to share, and have been keeping a series of short notes for me to pick up. Today’s topic is one of them, which I think has been a major pain to anyone involved in canvas app development!

So, the back story to this is that we’re able to use Power Automate flows together with canvas apps. What I mean by this is that we’re able to directly trigger them from within the canvas app, rather than needing to do something like edit or create a record, and then have the Power Automate flow trigger from the record creation or modification.

There’s a specific Power Apps trigger that’s available within Power Automate exactly for this purpose:

When clicked, it gives us the trigger line in the steps as follows:

So what we’d do is within the canvas app, we would bind a button (or another control) that when selected, it would then go away & trigger the Power Automate flow. Great – so many different things that we can get to happen! One of the benefits of doing things like this is that we can then pass information from the Power Automate flow back to the canvas app directly:

This can then mean that the user can know, within the canvas app itself, that the Power Automate flow has run, and use data (or other things) that have come out of it.

OK – all good so far.

The main issue to date has been with deploying canvas apps together with Power Automate flows. See, as per best practise, we would create a solution, place the canvas app, flows, and anything else that’s necessary for it to work within it, and then deploy the solution to our target environment/s. And that’s where things just…didn’t go quite right.

Obviously within the development environment, the canvas app would be hooked up to the flows, and everything would work. Clicking the button would cause the flow to run, etc. User authentication would be in place (along with licenses of course!), and it was just fine.

But when deploying a solution containing canvas apps and associated flows between environments (regardless of whether it’s been manually deploying, or automated using a tool such as Azure DevOps), the connections to the flows would be broken. Ie, the canvas app would run, but the flows wouldn’t trigger. Looking at the connections in the canvas app within Studio would show something like the following:

All of the connections to Power Automate flows would show as ‘Not connected’. It’s not even possible to click the ellipse next to them and re-connect them – the only option available is to remove it from the canvas app!

So in order to get things working again, we’d need to do the following steps:

Open up the canvas app
Remove all connections to Power Automate flows
Add a temporary button, set it to be a Power Automate trigger
Click through all of the Power Automates needing to be connected (waiting for each one to connect, then go to the next one)
Remove the temporary button
Save and publish the solution

This, in a nutshell, has been a (major) headache. For example, I’ve been working with a solution that has over 30 Power Automate flows that can be triggered from the canvas app (lots of different functionality!). Each deployment has needed the above process to be carried out, which has usually added on at least an hour to the deployment process!

Now, this hasn’t been something that’s been unknown. In fact, the official Microsoft documentation noted the following:

So this is something that Microsoft has been well aware of, but it’s been a pain point that we’ve had to work with.

However, this has now ALL changed, which I (and MANY others) are really pleased about!

Microsoft has rolled out an update last month that means that canvas app connections to Power Automate flows will NOT break when they’re deployed across environments! This is such a massive time-saver, that I’m now trying to work out what to do with all of my free time! Only kidding…more project work will commence!

So what we can now do is take our solution, deploy it across the different environment/s that we need to get it out to (whether manually, or automated using tools such as Azure DevOps), publish the solution, and then everything works! Amazing!!

One small caveat though – to ensure that this work, you will need to go into the app, and re-publish it on the latest Power Apps version. This should of course be done in a development environment, and then can be exported and deployed as required.

Microsoft have also updated their documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/data-platform/solutions-overview to remove the limitation text shown above. It’s a good place to keep an eye on changes that occur over time too.

This is definitely a welcome piece of development, and I know that we’ve been eagerly waiting for this for a while, and now it’s here!

Solution Dependencies & Management

Solutions are marvellous things. They enable us to be able to package up lots of components, and deploy them to different environments all together as one single package.

However, there have been changes over time as to how solutions are used. I’m not (for the most part) going to go into the Managed VS Unmanaged debate, which I leave to people who are more in the know….

Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps are installed using solutions. Third party apps provided by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) also use solutions.

In Power Apps, solutions are leveraged to transport apps and components from one environment to another or to apply a set of customisations to existing apps. A solution can contain one or more apps as well as other components such as entities, option sets, etc. You can get a solution from AppSource or from an independent software vendor (ISV).

Custom development should also take place within a solution, to allow it to be deployed appropriately.

But it’s important to take a closer look at how solutions work overall, as we can be involved on multiple projects within the same environment. Not only that, some solutions may require other solutions to be present first, in order to actually work! A great example of this is Master Data Management (or MDM), which is where companies have a ‘backbone’ of data, which other parts of the system then hangs off.

To understand this concept better, let’s take a quick look at solution layering.

Solution Layering

Layering occurs on the import of solutions and describes the dependency chain of components from the root solution introducing it, through each solution that extends or changes the components behaviours. Layers are created through an extension of an existing component (taking a dependency on it) or creation of a new component or version of a solution

Managed and unmanaged solutions exist at different levels within a Microsoft Dataverse environment. In Dataverse, there are two distinct layer levels:

Unmanaged layer. All imported unmanaged solutions and unmanaged customizations exist at this layer. The unmanaged layer is a single layer.
Managed layers. All imported managed solutions and the system solution exist at this level. When multiple managed solutions are installed, the last one installed is above the managed solution installed previously. This means that the second solution installed can customize the one installed before it. When two managed solutions have conflicting definitions, the runtime behaviour is either “Last one wins” or a merge logic is implemented. If you uninstall a managed solution, the managed solution below it takes effect. If you uninstall all managed solutions, the default behaviour defined within the system solution is applied. At the base of the managed layers level is the system layer. The system layer contains the tables and components that are required for the platform to function.

The following diagram introduces how managed and unmanaged solutions interact with the system solution to control application behavior.

The system solution represents the solution components defined within Dynamics 365 or the Power Platform. Without any managed solutions or customisations, the system solution defines the default application behaviour. Many of the components in the system solution are customisable and can be used in managed solutions or unmanaged customisations.
Managed solutions are installed on top of the system solution and can modify any customisable solution components or add more solution components. Managed solutions can also be layered on top of other managed solutions. As long as a managed solution enables customization of its solution components, other managed solutions can be installed on top of it and modify any customisable solution components that it provides.
Unmanaged customisations. All customisable solution components provided by the system solution or any managed solutions can be customized in the unmanaged customisations
Unmanaged solutions are groups of unmanaged customisations. Any unmanaged customized solution component can be associated with any number of unmanaged solutions. These can be edited & modified, regardless of the environment in which they’ve been deployed to
The ultimate behaviour of an instance of Dynamics 365 or Power Platform application is the culmination of the system solution, any managed solutions, and any unmanaged customisations.

The official stance of Microsoft, according to its Application Lifecyle Management (ALM) documentation, is that unmanaged solutions are used for development, and that managed solutions are released downstream to further environments. For bespoke solutions, however, this may not fit, and an appropriate balance must be found.

Data ‘Backbone’ & Solution Dependencies

Given the way that companies are adopting Power Platform (and Dynamics 365, of course!) it’s highly likely that we will build out system structures that will form the backbone for multiple applications on an on-going basis. With this in mind, it’s appropriate to put in place proper planning for this, to avoid any issues that could occur in the future with appropriate system designs

Solution Dependencies

When creating system structures within an environment, using unmanaged solutions, connecting two (or more) tables together will create dependencies on each other. In simple terms, if we connect Table A to Table B, there’s a reciprocal relationship created back from Table B to Table A:

This happens even if Table A is in Solution 1, and Table B is in Solution 2. If they’re in the same environment (& both solutions are unmanaged), it will create the two-way dependency.

This will cause issues if trying to deploy each solution individually, and will fail on import, as the system will require all items to be available in the solution

Workable scenario

The way in which to handle the issue of solution dependencies is to ensure that the ‘master backbone’ of system design is created in the main development environment, and then to use that in secondary development environments as the core of additional solutions:

This is in line with the emerging recent Microsoft Best Practise information around solution management (which is likely to be moving towards having a single environment per developer, rather than multiple developers working in the same environment).

The steps for doing this are as follows:

Main ‘core solution’ exists (as unmanaged) within the main development environment
When a project requires this to build upon:
1. Secondary development environment is created
1. ‘Core solution’ is exported as managed from the main development environment, & imported into the secondary development environment
1. Project work is carried out within the secondary development environment
1. Once project solution is complete (or when appropriate for deployment), it can be exported from the secondary development environment
  1. If deploying directly from the secondary development environment to downstream environments, it should be exported as managed
1. The solution should be exported as unmanaged, and imported back into the main development environment. This will not cause dependencies to be created with the ‘core solution’ in it

Note: The main ‘core solution’ should consist of the items that are needed for core system work. If additional items are needed for multiple projects to work off (eg Account Manager field), this would need to be added to the core solution, rather than the individual project solution/s, as otherwise there could be further issues downstream.

If the project is completed, but requires further work to be carried out later on (or development support), then the following should be done:

Secondary development environment is created
‘Core solution’ exported from the main development environment as a managed solution, and imported into the secondary development environment
Project solution exported as unmanaged from the main development environment, and imported into the secondary development environment
Work and/or support can be carried out within the secondary development environment, and released appropriately

I’m expecting further information around this to be released by Microsoft in due course (I’m a little surprised there’s not more out there at the moment, to be honest!). It’s vital that we ensure that we’re working with solutions in the right way, to stop any issues occurring later on down the line.

Have you ever had a problem around this? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear your experiences!

Managed Solutions, & replacing a field

Well to start with, I’m sure that I’m going to get pulled up by some people for my use of the word ‘field’ in the title. After all, officially it’s now a ‘column’! But I (still) can’t let go of calling them as I’ve done so for over a decade, so field it is.

Now to the actual topic of this blog post, which is centred around Managed Solutions. Leaving aside the whole debate about whether we should be using managed or unmanaged solutions (& when/where to do each), there is one definitive benefit of using a managed solution.

See, unmanaged solutions are additive in nature. Work is done in the development environment, then deployed. Further work is done (additional items added, etc), and deployed, and they then appear in the downstream environments. However, if you delete an item in the development environment, it’s not removed when the solution is deployed downstream.

Managed solutions, on the other hand, are both additive & detractive. As with unmanaged solutions, items added in the development environment are also added downstream when deployed. However, if an item is removed from the solution in the development environment, it will also be removed when the solution is deployed downstream. It’s one of the useful ways to ensure that you don’t end up with random unused items just lying around in Production (which have a habit then of popping up in the Advanced Find window, for example). So it’s really quite handy for a lot of reasons to go down this route.

Well, I found myself going down this route recently, but with slightly unexpected results, I’ll freely admit…

The scenario was that we had deployed a managed solution to the UAT (test) environment on a client project. Then the client changed their mind (shock & horror!!) as to a specific item, and we needed to change it from a text item to a lookup item. Obviously (as per best practise, of course) this would need to be done in the development environment, and then released downstream. Given that this is a managed solution, I’d expect this to work, without any issues. Well, it didn’t…

The change in the development environment (deleted the old item, ‘re-created’ it as a lookup with the same system name) was done, we exported it as managed, and then went to import it in the UAT environment. It took the solution file, thought about it for a while (it’s somewhat of a large solution), & then errored:

Exception type: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault] Message: Attribute mdm_field is a String, but a Lookup type was specified.

Now I was somewhat confused by this message occurring. It’s not been the first time I’ve seen it over the years, but in my previous experience I’ve seen it when handling unmanaged solutions. It’s when you delete an item in the development environment, re-create it as a different item type (with the same underlying system name), and then deploy it as unmanaged. The solution import in the second environment fails due to the different in the type (as it sees the same name). This, of course, is to be expected.

But here we’ve been using managed solutions for deployment, and as mentioned above, they’re detractive as well. The expected behaviour (at least from my side of things) would be that the system would note that the item type has changed, remove the old item, & import the new item. In my mind, that’s logical, but apparently not?

See, even managed solutions have their limitations, of which this is one of them. Having checked with several other people who I reached out to around this, I’ve discovered that it can’t work in the way that I was expecting it to. Instead, a specific process has to be followed

In the development environment, remove the item, & export the solution as managed
In the downstream environment(s), deploy this (interim) managed solution. This will remove the item from the environments
In the development environment, re-create the item with the different system type. Then export it as managed
In the downstream environments, deploy this solution. This will then add the item (with the new system type) into the environment.

This means that development & deployment teams (if separate ones) need to co-ordinate around this, to ensure it’s done in the right way. It could also be developed/exported in succession, and then imported in succession as well (either manually, or through an Azure DevOps Pipeline, for example).

This worked wonderfully for us, and to be honest, I was quite relieved after several hours of frustration with things. Even better, it was a Friday, so meant that the week could end well!

Have you ever come across this, and been frustrated as well? Have you got a similar story with something else that happened to you around solutions? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

‘Ghost’ lookup value following deployment

This is something that stumped me fairly recently. It’s also something that I was trying to work out what I should use at the title for this post! Let me share what happened.

I’m working on a project that’s quite critical (COVID-19 related). This is a project that we’ve built something around Dynamics 365 as an additional wrapper, to provide specific functionality for the pandemic. It’s being rolled out (the same solution) to multiple clients, and is only using the functionality from Power Platform. No custom code at all.

Now, before going into the specifics around it, let’s take a moment to revisit what a lookup field is, and what it does. Essentially a lookup field connects two tables together (wow – that felt strange not to use the word ‘entity’!). In the front interface, it’s used for a 1:N relationship.

So for example, we can have a lookup from Account to Contact, to set the primary contact for the account. The user navigates to the field, searches for the record they’re wanting to associate, and saves it.

Underneath, there’s a relationship that’s automatically created between the two tables, showing the way that the relationship will go (ie 1:N or N:1). This is created on both sides (more on that another time around dependencies), and most people will never need to modify it

When I first started with this particular project, I got the solution, and deployed it into the Dev environment (for the project that I was on). On testing it out, I found something very interesting. We’re using the Case (Incident) table, and there are various lookup fields on it. One of these was already populated with a value. Hmm – that’s interesting, I thought. It was a new deployment, and we hadn’t set any static data up yet at all. So how could it already be populated?

How is this being set, when I’ve not entered it into the system as a record…

Furthermore, I was unable to save the Case record. When I tried to, I was getting an interesting error:

On drilling down into the error log (which admittedly is actually getting better in the details shown in it, thankfully!), it turned out to be because I didn’t have access to the referenced record (in the lookup field). It just didn’t exist.

So the lookup field value was coming in with a hard-coded GUID (record identifier). But how was this being done, especially if there weren’t any records (of that type) in the system at all?

From my experience of things, I could think of two ways in which to populate a lookup field with a hard-coded value:

Through a ‘real-time’ Power Automate flow, on create of the record. It’s possible to set a GUID value in the flow, and then it would be set
Through custom code, running on the form. Again, it’s possible to hard-code a GUID there, and then set the field

However on checking both options, none of them were happening. No Power Automate flows touching the Case record, and no custom code at all on the Case.

It was then, digging through the other parts of the solution, that I saw various Business Rules. For those unfamiliar with these, I’ll quote from the official Microsoft documentation around them:

By combining conditions and actions, you can do any of the following with business rules:

Set column values
Clear column values
Set column requirement levels
Show or hide columns
Enable or disable columns
Validate data and show error messages
Create business recommendations based on business intelligence.

I’ve used Business Rules (somewhat extensively) before. However on going into the one for the Case table, I found that something was happening that I wasn’t aware could happen! It’s actually possible to set a lookup field value through it:

Even though we’ve deployed the solution from the original development environment to a different environment, this is still set. But there are no records that are available:

I had never thought that it would be possible – to set a static value (eg a number, or some text), fine. But to set referential data? Wow.

Obviously this can be quite helpful. The bit that it’s NOT helpful though is when deploying the solution to another environment (as this situation was). It doesn’t help if you re-create the record that it’s referring to with using the same record name, as it’s using the underlying GUID (which you can’t re-create). This really does take solution deployment into a whole new perspective, where you need to be careful around these sorts of things as well.

So something new that I’ve learned (I do try to learn something new each day), and specifically around an area I thought I knew quite well. It did take some time, but I’m glad that I (finally) found the root cause of it, and identified what was causing it.

Have you ever had something like this happen, where you’re searching & searching for the cause of it? Drop a line below – I’d love to hear!

Good news for Power Automate Flows!

As a starter for 10, this wasn’t actually the blog post that I was going to write today. In fact, the subject of the post wasn’t even going to be about Power Automate! However, there was some really amazing news that dropped today from Microsoft, which I just couldn’t pass up being able to talk about.

You’ve guessed it – it’s about Power Automate! Well, I suppose that the post title was somewhat of a giveaway, wasn’t it…ah well. So let’s go ahead and find out what this is all about then!

To date, we’ve been able to put Power Automate flows into a solution. Well, it wasn’t there exactly at the beginning of things, but it happened somewhere along the way. This was very convenient, as we didn’t then need to deploy each one individually to different environments. Some solutions can contain dozens & dozens of flows, and we really do love to package them all up together for ease of movement.

So that was good. But there was still a (major) ‘bugbear’ (as I like to refer to them as). This is the fact that after we deploy a Power Automate flow, we then need to go into it & (re)authenticate it. This is due to the fact that the connector/s that it uses contains what is referred to as a ‘secret’, and these can’t be moved across environments. As a result, we need to essentially recreate the ‘secret’ in the connector (ie authentication details) every time we move it. This is an annoyance (if you have one or two flows), and an absolute bloody nightmare if you have lots.

For the technical minded – every action in a flow is bound to a specific instance of a connection that it will use to “execute” that action. This is why when moving flows across environments, users are required to rebind every operation to a connection.

For example, I’ve been working with COVID-19 triage solutions. These contain lots of flows within them, connecting to multiple different sources, and doing different things. Every time we’ve performed a release (even if it’s just a simple update), we’ve needed to manually go through each flow, (re)authenticate them, and turn them on. If you forgot one, then everything can come crashing down & not work! But there’s been no other way to do it. To represent this visually, we have the following diagram

For each & every Power Automate, the connection line gets ‘broken’ when it’s deployed, and needs to be re-made.

Until now, that is. For today, Microsoft has announced the Public Preview for ‘Connection References’. Now when something is put into Preview, I usually caveat the usage of it with saying things like ‘it might go away, or not be released for a while’. But I’m going to be quietly confident about this particular piece of functionality, as I really don’t think it’s going to be pulled!

So what exactly are these? Well, in (mostly) simple terms, Connection References provide an ‘in-between’ or ‘abstraction’ layer for the connections that use them. Let’s show this visually as well

We still need to re-authenticate the Connection Reference once we deploy things. But let’s now see how we can save ourselves a massive headache, and LOTS of time:

Oooo…now this is looking better. Instead of having to update three Power Automate flows, we only have to update the SINGLE Connection Reference that’s sitting in the middle. Now multiple that by however many flows you have (eg sending emails out, etc), and start calculating how much time you’ll now be able to spend on coffee breaks, rather than doing this manually one at a time…

We can create Connection References directly from within the solution:

We then give it a name & description, choose which connector we’re going to be using, and either select an existing connection or set a new one up:

Once we’re finished, we click ‘Create’ at the bottom. Voila – we can now see it within our solution!

Note: Interestingly enough I couldn’t actually see this within the solution after I created it, even with the component selector set to show ‘All’. How I actually got them to display was changing the component selector to ‘Connection Reference’, and they then showed up. I’m thinking that this is due to it being new today/in the process of rolling out, and am expecting it to display without any issues in the near future

Let’s take a look at a Power Automate flow itself now to see how it’s referenced. When we open an item with a connector, we can now see the following:

We’re able to select the Connection Reference that we’re wanting to use. Simple, yet so powerful.

When importing a solution containing a Connection Reference, we will be prompted during the import process to set the actual connection that should be used with it:

If you don’t have any connections set up already in the environment, you’ll be able to create a new one from the dropdown.

Some things to note around this:

During the preview phase, Microsoft has specified that a single Connection Reference can only be used by up to 16 flows. This limitation will be removed once it goes GA
Existing flows will not be automatically upgraded. What you can do though is export the unmanaged solution, re-import it to the same environment, and then they will be automatically created for you. The flow/s can then be edited to update them to the correct connection reference record
The connection name and connection reference name are not currently synchronised. They can be different. Therefore it’s best to keep the naming conventions the same. Don’t set different names for connections and their associated connection references.

In summary – this is an awesome step forward with Power Automate functionality. I’m already tasking some of the developers on the team to re-do existing solutions to use it for ease of use. How do you think it’ll best benefit you? Drop a comment below!

Tag: solutions

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