Rajeev Pentyala – Technical Blog on Power Platform, Azure and AI

In one of my previous articles, I explained how to migrate data between environments using cloud flows.

In this article, lets learn how to move data between environments using Dataflow.

Prerequisites

• System Administrator or System Customizer security role permission on both the source and target environments.
• Power Apps, Power Automate, or Dataverse license (per app or per user).
• Two Dataverse environments with database.

Scenario:

• I have an environment Developer Dev that contains the following Account records.

• I have another environment Trail Dev which does not have any Account records.

• Lets create a Dataflow to move Account records from the Developer Dev to Trail Dev environments.

Steps to create Dataflow:

Ensure that the tables are already defined in the target environment. We are using the OOB Account table, which will be present in both environments. In the case of a custom table, ensure that the custom table is available in the target environment.

• Sign in to Power Apps.
• Select the required target (i.e., Trail Dev) environment from the upper-right corner.
• In the left navigation pane, expand the Data menu, and then select Dataflows.
• Select New dataflow to create a new dataflow. Provide a name for the dataflow. Select Create.

• Next choose datasource as Dataverse. Provide Environment domain as domain URL of source environment (i.e., Developer Dev).
• Click on Sign In.

• Post sign-in, click on Next

• Select the Account table and click on Transform data.

• You can perform Data Transformations such as Removing unwanted columns, Combine Columns etc in this window.
• Click Next

• In the Map tables section, choose Load to existing table (recommended) and select Account from the Destination table dropdown.
• If the schema is identical in both source and target tables, you can select Auto map to quickly map the columns, which I did.

• Click Next
• In the Refresh settings you can choose either Manual or automatic refresh.
• Select Refresh manually since this is a one-time migration and then select Publish.

• Wait till the Draft status turns as Published

• Once the Last refresh timestamp shows as successful (refer to the diagram above), you can go to the Account table of the target environment (i.e., Trial Dev) and see the migrated records from the source environment (i.e., Developer Dev).

You might also want to refer to my previous article to learn more about Dataflow and how to add it to a Dataverse solution.

🙂