Month: January 2024

This article is part of the Working with Power Automate Solutions series and of the larger Working with Power Automate series I am writing on my experiences working with the Power Automate, which is part of the Power Platform from Microsoft. I also have a related series of articles on Power Automate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC.

If you want to import a managed solution into a non-development environment , you can do so from the Solutions page in Power Automate. Make sure you don’t have a solution selected and click the Import solution button near the top of the page:

Continue reading “Working with Power Automate Solutions: Importing A Managed Solution”

This article is part of the Working with Power Automate Solutions series and of the larger Working with Power Automate series I am writing on my experiences working with the Power Automate, which is part of the Power Platform from Microsoft. I also have a related series of articles on Power Automate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC.

If you are developing a Power Automate solution and are ready to deploy it to a QA, UAT or production environment, you can do this by exporting the solution as an managed solution. Do this be navigating to the Solutions page, selecting the solution you want to export and click the Export solution button near the top of the page (ringed in red):

If you haven’t published your solution, you can do this on the Before you export pane which opened at the side of the screen; click the Publish button:

Continue reading “Working with Power Automate Solutions: Exporting A Managed Solution”

This article is part of the Working with Power Automate Solutions series and of the larger Working with Power Automate series I am writing on my experiences working with the Power Automate, which is part of the Power Platform from Microsoft. I also have a related series of articles on Power Automate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC.

If you want to import an unmanaged solution into an environment different to the one in which it was developed, you can do so from the Solutions page in Power Automate. Make sure you don’t have a solution selected and click the Import solution button near the top of the page:

Continue reading “Working with Power Automate Solutions: Importing An Unmanaged Solution”

This article is part of the Working with Power Automate Solutions series and of the larger Working with Power Automate series I am writing on my experiences working with the Power Automate, which is part of the Power Platform from Microsoft. I also have a related series of articles on Power Automate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC.

If you are developing a Power Automate solution and want to either move it to a new development environment or add it to a source control system, you can do this by exporting the solution as an unmanaged solution. Do this be navigating to the Solutions page, selecting the solution you want to export and click the Export solution button near the top of the page (ringed in red):

If you haven’t published your solution, you can do this on the Before you export pane which opened at the side of the screen; click the Publish button:

Continue reading “Working with Power Automate Solutions: Exporting An Unmanaged Solution”

This article is part of the Working with Power Automate Solutions series and of the larger Working with Power Automate series I am writing on my experiences working with the Power Automate, which is part of the Power Platform from Microsoft. I also have a related series of articles on Power Automate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC.

I said in the last article on publishing solutions that I would cover exporting and importing next, but, on reflection, I thought I’d briefly discuss version numbering solutions before doing the export/import.

When you create a solution it is given the version number 1.0.0.0 and when you export a solution, Power Automate automatically updates the last segment of the version number, so it would become 1.0.0.1. However, you can overwrite the numbering to increase the number in different ways.

The four segments in Power Automate are:

1. Major
2. Minor
3. Build
4. Revision

Continue reading “Working with Power Automate Solutions: Version Numbering for Solutions”

This article is part of the Working with Power Automate Solutions series and of the larger Working with Power Automate series I am writing on my experiences working with the Power Automate, which is part of the Power Platform from Microsoft. I also have a related series of articles on Power Automate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC.

As mentioned in the article where I introduced solutions, when you have a solution which is ready for deployment, or even where you have made changes to the solution since it was last published, then the solution should be published for the implementation of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) .

While technically speaking, a solution which does not use the Common Data Service (CDS) does not need to be published, I’d generally recommend following best practice of publishing all solutions.

For the work I have been doing with Power Automate, involving Business Central and approvals, I am interacting with the CDS as the approvals store the history and status of pending approvals in CDS.

To publish a solution, open the solution and click the Publish all customizations button at the top of the solution page:

Once the publication is complete, a green status confirmation bar will be displayed towards the top of the screen:

With the solution published, it can now be exported (although I should not that the export process itself does prompt for the solution to be published, so you could publish from there instead of using this method).

Over the next few articles, I’ll take a look at exporting and import the solution as both an unmanaged and managed solution.

This article is part of the Working with Power Automate Solutions series and of the larger Working with Power Automate series I am writing on my experiences working with the Power Automate, which is part of the Power Platform from Microsoft. I also have a related series of articles on Power Automate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC.

To create a soltuion, log into the Power Automate website and, in the navigation pane to the left, click on Solutions; click the New solution button at the top:

Enter a Display Name for the new solution; the Name field will automatically populate with the same text, although with invalid characters (such as space, slash, backslash and asterisk, amongst others) automatically removed.

Select your Publisher.

The Version will default in as 1.0.0.0, although you can change this if necessary. Sometimes when working on pre-release versions I might make the version number start with 0, but for the very first release would return the version to 1.0.0.0 through Edit Settings before exporting as a managed solution.

When the new solution has been configured, click the Save button at the bottom of the pane; the list of solutions will update and show the new solution, ready for you to start using it.

This article is part of the Working with Power Automate Solutions series and of the larger Working with Power Automate series I am writing on my experiences working with the Power Automate, which is part of the Power Platform from Microsoft. I also have a related series of articles on Power Automate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC.

As I mentioned in the article on what a solution publisher is, in this article I am going to step through the creation of a solution publisher.

To do this, log into the Power Automate website and, in the left navigation pane, select Solutions; click the Publishers tab and then click the New publisher button at the top of the page:

In the New publisher detail pane, which opens on the right of the screen, enter the Display name, Name and Prefix; as you enter the prefix, the Choice value prefix will automatically populate, although you can change it by over-typing.

You can also choose to enter a Description giving a longer outline of who the publisher is; perhaps a tagline or mission statement.

Clicking the Contact tab allows you to enter the Phone, Email and Website as well as address details for the publisher. This is handy if you are a VAR or ISV distributing your solutions to clients or customers, because you can enter details of your support team.