This article is part of the 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.
When I work on projects with clients in areas like approvals, I always use a tool like Visio or draw.io to define the workflow approval which will be created.
One feature of Power Automate which looks quite interesting is the ability to create a flow from a Visio diagram; this is something I want to look into, but suspect that the flow created in Visio will still leave a lot of holes in the flow which gets created.
However, that got me thinking about creating a Visio diagram from a flow so that a diagram could be generated to pick up all of the changes made to the flow after the initial creation.
Unfortunately, while Microsoft allow you to create a flow from Visio, they don’t like you to create a Visio from the flow. It seems like quite a large gap in functionality.
However, there is a utility called the XrmToolBox which offers a fair bit of functionality. On their website they say:
XrmToolBox is a Windows application that connects to Microsoft Dataverse. Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) applications, like Dynamics 365 for Sales, Service or Talent also use Microsoft Dataverse as their foundational data service. XrmToolBox, provides tools to ease customization, configuration and operation tasks for anything built on Microsoft Dataverse, including Dynamics 365 CE (formerly CRM) and model-driven PowerApps. It is shipped with more than 30 tools to make administration, customization or configuration tasks easier and less time consuming. And more than 100 other tools are available in the Tool Library.
And one of the tools which is available for the XrmToolBox is Flow To Visio. This allows you to yuse the Business Central connection in the XrmToolBox to download a copy of the flow as a Visio diagram.
I need to do some testing with it, but my first impressions are positive. The video from Jon Levesque where he talks to creator of the Flow To Visio tool shows what the tool is capable of doing:
Working with Power Automate
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