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[Quick Tip] Power Automate flow | Get current Environment ID
Lets learn how to fetch the current ‘Environment ID’ in Power Automate flows.
What is Environment Id:
- In Power Platform, Environment is a space to store, manage, and share your organization’s business data, apps, chatbots, and flows.
- Every Environment will be associated with an unique identifier.
In few scenarios, we would need ‘Environment ID’ to perform actions. Lets see how to fetch the current Environment ID in Power Automate Flow.
Power Automate Flow to fetch current Environment ID:
- Create a ‘Manually trigger flow’ with a Compose action.
- Write the expression workflow()[‘tags’][‘environmentName’]
- Save and Test the flow.
- You will find the ‘Environment ID’ in the Compose action ‘Outputs’.
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Power Apps | Change App Owner using Power Automate Flow
Assume that you have a canvas app with Owner as ‘User 1’ and you would want to make ‘User 2’ as Owner of the App.
We have couple of options.
- Using Set-AdminPowerAppOwner command of PowerShell.
- Create a Power Automate Flow and trigger Set App Owner action of ‘Power Apps for Admins’ connector.
In this article lets see how to use Power Automate Flow to change the Owner. Following is how the completed flow looks like.
Key in this flow is ‘Set App Owner’ Action and following are the parameters.
| Name | Key | Required | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Environment Name | environment | True | string | Name field of the Environment. |
| PowerApp Name | app | True | string | Name field of the PowerApp. |
| API Version | api-version | string | The date value of the API version. | |
| Content Type | Content-Type | string | The content type of the API request. | |
| Role For Old App Owner | roleForOldAppOwner | string | The role name for the old app owner. Choose from CanView, CanViewWithShare, or CanEdit. | |
| New PowerApp Owner | newAppOwner | string | The principal object ID of the new owner. |
Lets see step by step process to build the flow.
Step by Step budling flow:
- Create a new flow as shown below.
- As mentioned, key component of this flow is ‘Set App Owner’ Action and in the next steps, we will see how to pass parameters to ‘Set App Owner’ Action.
- First we need to capture the ‘New PowerApp Owner’ parameter which is ‘Principal object ID’ of the User.
- Note: ‘Principal object ID’ is not GUID of ‘System User’ in Dataverse. Its Azure Active Directory ID.
- Add a ‘Get user profile (V2)’ action of Office 365 Users connector to capture the ‘Principal object ID’ of the User.
- Rename the ‘Get user profile (V2)’ to ‘GetUserProfile’. (Optional Step)
- Set “User (UPN)” as the User Id of the new Owner.
- Now add ‘Set App Owner’ action.
- Set ‘New PowerApp Owner’ as ‘Id’ from the output of previous ‘GetUserProfile’ action.
- For ‘Environment Name‘ parameter, go to Power Apps maker portal, open ‘Settings -> Developer resources’.
- Copy ‘Environment ID’ and paste in ‘Environment Name‘ parameter of ‘Set App Owner’ action.
- For ‘PowerApp Name‘ parameter, go to Power Apps maker portal, open ‘App -> Details’.
- Copy the ‘App ID‘ and paste in ‘PowerApp Name’ parameter of ‘Set App Owner’ action.
- For ‘Role For Old App Owner‘ parameter, either you can leave or provide ‘CanView’.
- Leave ‘API Version‘ and ‘Content Type‘ as default.
- You should see the flow as below once you follow all mentioned steps.
- That’s all needed!. Run the flow and you should see the owner of the App to the new user mention in the flow.
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Power Platform – Pass json collection from Canvas App to Power Automate
Refer my previous article for steps to pass json collection from Power Automate to Canvas App.
Now lets see how to pass json collection from a Canvas app to Power Automate flow.
Before we start lets make sure to meet all the prerequisites.
Prerequisites:
- Subscribe to 30 days trial and get Office 365 account.
- Connect to Power Automate portal using Office 365 account to build Power Automate flow.
- Connect to Power Apps maker portal using Office 365 account to build the Canvas App.
Once all prerequisites are met, here is the high level design:
- Create a new Canvas app.
- Prepare a json collection.
- Create a new Power Automate flow.
- Trigger Power automate flow from Canvas App by passing the collection as parameter.
- Read the json collection from Power Automate flow.
- Create ‘Contact’ records in CDS.
Lets get started.
Steps to configure Canvas App:
- Connect to Power Apps maker portal using the Office 365 account.
- Create a new Canvas App.
- Note: Make sure the same Environment used for Power Automate is selected.
- Add a new button ‘Generate Sample Collection’.
- On button’s ‘OnSelect’ prepare a json collection using ‘ClearCollect’ function as below.
- Once your run the App and click ‘Generate Sample Collection’ button, you should see the collection from ‘File -> Collections’ tab.
Steps to configure the Power Automate Flow:
- Connect to Power Automate portal using the same office 365 credentials used to connect to Power App portal.
- Create a new ‘Instant flow’ by selecting the right Environment.
- Provide a name ‘GetCollectionFromPowerApp’ and select trigger as ‘PowerApps’.
- Now, we need to read the collection passed from Canvas app to a variable. Lets add a new ‘Initialize Variable’ action.
- In the ‘Initialize Variable’ action,
- Provide variable name by setting ‘Name’ field. I set it as ‘collPersons’.
- Type: String
- Select ‘Value’ and click on ‘Ask in PowerApps’. A auto generated name would appear and select the same.
- Once we receive the collection and stored in a string variable ‘collPersons’, next we need to parse in to json collection.
- Add a new ‘Parse JSON’ action.
- In ‘Parse JSON’ action,
- set Content as ‘collPersons’ from ‘Initialize Variable’ action.
- Next we need to provide the json schema coming from Canvas app. To do that, click on ‘Generate from sample’.
- Copy the json collection formed in Canvas app using ClearCollect function and paste as below.
- If no warnings, your ‘Parse JSON’ pane should look as below.
- Now we got json collection parsed and we are good start final step, creating records to CDS.
- Add ‘Create a new record’ CDS action and select the ‘Environment’ and ‘Entity Name’
- Set the attributes (Last Name and Email) from ‘Parse JSON’ action.
- Once you set variables in ‘Create a new record’ CDS action, flow would automatically wrap the action in ‘Apply to each’.
Trigger the Power automate flow from Canvas App:
Now we have Power automate flow with the logic to read and parse the json collection and add them to CDS as Contact records, lets trigger the flow from Canvas App.
- Open the Canvas app created in above sections.
- Add a new button ‘Share Collection To Flow’
- Select the button, from the ribbon menu, click on ‘Action -> Power Automate’.
- From the pane select the ‘GetCollectionFromPowerApp’ Power app flow.
- After few seconds, you would see the Run() command auto populated. Now pass the ‘collPersonalInfo’ collection wrapped in JSON() function.
- JSON() function is required to convert the ‘collPersonalInfo’ collection to JSON string as the Power Automate flow expects ‘String’ variable as first action.
- Finally ‘OnSelect’ should look as below.
- Now run the App and click ‘Share Collection To Flow’ button, post run, go to Power automate flow’s history and you should see it ran successfully.
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D365 – Shifting from Dynamics Workflow to Power Automate flow
First things first, Microsoft Flow is now Power Automate.
If you are either a dynamics developer or administrator, off late you might have noticed a flashing banner while creating new Process from Dynamics instance.
From the banner, its clear that Microsoft recommends ‘Power automate flows’ over conventional ‘Process’.
In this article, I am going to cover basics of following items, which helps you in decision making to some extent.
- Common Data Service (CDS) vs Dynamics 365 connector
- Automated flow vs Instant flow (i.e., On-demand process)
- Formatting Dates
Lets get in to the details.
CDS connector vs Dynamics connector:
When you are creating a flow, you need to choose b/w CDS and Dynamics connector.
The key differentiation when switching from Dynamics ‘Process’ to ‘Flow’ is,
- With CDS connector you can set ‘Scope’ and ‘Filter Attributes’ but not with Dynamics connector.
Lets understand this with an example.
Create a flow with CDS connector:
- Connect to your Power automate portal
- Click on ‘+ Create’ tab and choose ‘Automated flow’
- In the new window, choose the ‘Common Data Service’ connector.
- Under the ‘Triggers’, select ‘When a record is updated’ trigger.
- If you notice, under ‘When a record is updated’, there are ‘Scope’ and ‘Attribute Filter’ options.
- Scope : Scope decides the affected records up on flow execution. Get more details here.
- Attribute Filter: If no filtering attributes are set flow will execute on every field updates. Add attribute filters to minimize flow execution, only on specified field updates.
- Now add an action from the ‘Actions’ list. I’ve added a ‘Create a new record’ action.
Create a flow with Dynamics 365 connector:
- Connect to your Power automate portal
- Click on ‘+ Create’ tab and choose ‘Automated flow’
- In the new window, choose the ‘Dynamics 365’ connector.
- Under the ‘Triggers’, select ‘When a record is updated’ trigger.
- This time, under ‘When a record is updated’ there are NO ‘Scope’ and ‘Attribute Filter’ options.
- Which means, the flow will trigger on all field updates and there is no provision of ‘Attribute Filter’ in Dynamics 365 Connector.
Automated flow vs Instant flow (i.e., On-demand process):
One of the common questions from Admins is, how can they create an ‘On-demand’ power automate flow similar to conventional ‘On-demand’ workflow. The answer is Instant flow.
Lets see how to create a simple on-demand flow and run.
Create an Instant Flow:
- Connect to your Power automate portal
- Click on ‘+ Create’ tab and choose ‘Instant flow’
- Note: You can also create ‘Instant flow’ from Dynamics application.
- Go to the entity, from ‘Flow’ menu, click on ‘Create a flow’.
- In the new window, choose the ‘Common Data Service’ connector.
- Under the ‘Triggers’, select ‘When a record is selected’ trigger.
- Select the ‘Environment’ and ‘Entity Name’
- Environment: If you want your flow to always trigger based on an event in a specific environment, select that environment or Choose (Default), which will always use the database within the environment in which Power Automate runs.
- Now add an action from the ‘Actions’ list. I’ve added a ‘Create a new record’ action.
- In above screen, I am setting ‘Transaction Audit’ entities ‘Name’ field with concatenating ‘Transactions’ entities ‘Name’ and current date (i.e., utcNow()).
- Use ‘Dynamic content’ window, to refer the values from Previous step.
Trigger Instant Flow:
- Connect to Dynamics instance and open the record for which you have flow registered. In my case, my flow registered on ‘Transaction’ Entity.
- From the ‘Flow’ menu, select your flow.
- Click on ‘Run flow’
- Make sure you got the success screen as below.
- Now check whether the Action executed. In my example, I am creating a child record (i.e., Transaction Audit)
Formatting Dates:
If you would have noticed the previous screen, the ‘Name’ field of the ‘Transaction Audit’ was set to UTC date format.
To format the date to your choice, use formatDateTime function in your flow’s ‘Expression’.
Save and run the flow, you should see the formatted date as below.
Notes:
- One more edge CDS connector over Dynamics connector is in terms of execution speed. More details
🙂
Rajeev Pentyala - Microsoft Power Platform 