Category: Dynamics

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.

As I’ve commented in other articles, solutions should be used when developing Power Automate flows, and in fact form part of the recommended application lifecycle management (ALM) scenario of moving a flow between Power Automate environments.

Environment variables are only available within a solution and are used to store parameter keys and values used within the flows of the solution. This separation of settings from functionality allows the behaviour of a flow to be changed without needing to amend the flow in the development environment and the solution redeployed to the production environment.

While you can and should use environment variables for all parameters used by flows within a solution, the two which I would say should always be created for a flow used with Business Central are the ones for the environment and company.

The main benefits of using environment variables are:

• Provide new parameter values while importing solutions to other environments.
• Store configuration for the data sources used in canvas apps and flows. For example, SharePoint Online site and list parameters can be stored as environment variables; therefore allowing you to connect to different sites and lists in different environments without needing to modify the apps and flows.
• Package and transport your customization and configuration together and manage them in a single location.
• Package and transport secrets, such as credentials used by different components, separately from the components that use them.
• One environment variable can be used across many different solution components – whether they’re the same type of component or different. For example, a canvas app and a flow can use the same environment variable. When the value of the environment variable needs to change, you only need to change one value.
• Additionally, if you need to retire a data source in production environments, you can simply update the environment variable values with information for the new data source. The apps and flows don’t require modification and will start using the new data source.
• Supported by SolutionPackager and DevOps tools enable continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
• The environment variables can be unpacked and stored in source control. You may also store different environment variables values files for the separate configuration needed in different environments. Solution Packager can then accept the file corresponding to the environment the solution will be imported to.

More details on environment variables are available on < ahref='https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/data-platform/environmentvariables'>Microsoft Learn.

This isn’t something which I have an issue with at the moment, but, when researching for something else, I came across a blog post which mentioned it and thought it was worth noting for future reference.

You can configure a trigger in Power Automate for the When a record is created action in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, which will, as the name suggests, run when a record is changed.

However, if you update multiple records very quickly, such as when using a configuration package, the flow won’t be triggered as there is a design limitation of maximum 100 record changes per 30 seconds.

The blog post I found this discussed in was from Microsoft MVP, Stefano Demiliani, where he discusses the limitation and also proposes a solution of using Azure Queues, where an entry is added via JSON to the Azure Queue for each updated record; a Power Automate flow is set up to process when there are messages in the queue.

Stefano also notes that there is an annoucned change to the way Power Automate will hande record changes which will mitigate this issue in future releases.

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:

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.

Most of my work is with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business central, which means most of my work with Power Automate is going to using it along side Business Central.

I have a series currently underway for posts specifically about Power Automate with Business Central, to which I will be regularly adding articles.

Continue reading “Working with Power Automate: Power Automate with Business Central”

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.

In the previous article of this series, I wrote that there were three types of flow available with Power Automate, and it was the cloud flows which this series would be covering.

There are four types of cloud flow available:

Flow type	Use case	Automation target
Approval flows	Create an automation that is triggered by a user requesting approval in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.	Approval of purchase or sales documents, or changes to master records such as accounts, vendors or items.
Automated flows	Create an automation that is triggered by an event such as a record being created or changed.	Connectors for cloud or on-premises services connect your accounts and enable them to talk to each other.
Instant flows	Start an automation with a click of a button. You can automate repetitive tasks such as sending an email to a salesperson or customer from a customer card or sales quote.	Wide range of tasks such as requesting an approval, an action in Teams or SharePoint.
Scheduled flows	Schedule an automation such as weekly run of invoice reminders to customers.	Tasks that need to be automated on a schedule.

As most of my work is with Business Central, the above table includes the approval flows which are not generally listed in the standard documentation on Power Automate.