Help make Flow Design easier

[AnnaChu]

The Power Automate Designer team would love to hear feedback from the perspective of novice Power Automate users, citizen developers and low coders on their experience with Power Automate Designer. When designing flows, what do they struggle most with? If this sounds like something you’ve heard someone mention, please forward them this pre-screening survey to complete: https://aka.ms/MPA_DesignerFeedback

@kishbuy238 and team are interested in hosting a screen-sharing session to identify opportunities to improve the experience. This survey will be open through to August.

[stayinginsync]

Better support for Multi-choice options (and all results) from Microsoft Forms. 

Right now, if a user selects multiple items from a choice question, they are thrown into a single string rather than an array and only populates if the column is Single Text.  This adds additional special characters and harder to perform metrics on in SharePoint.  At one point I tried matching the choice values from the form with the choices in a SP list, but it got cumbersome to manage both independently.  

It would be fantastic if there was a simpler way to map Form questions/answers to SharePoint list columns.

The only way I've figured to resolve this is to make a whole PowerApp form from scratch, which is not ideal and more time-consuming.

[kishbuy238]

This is great feedback @Redders! Please note that you can click on an action ellipsis(...) and use 'Static Output' to disable select actions in your flow, we are looking to extend this to make it available to all flow actions. 

[Redders]

Thanks, I'll try this functionality to see how it works

[Redders]

Another way that the UI could be improved is to create a way to step through the automation and see what is happening at each stage. Many times have I needed to run a large flow just to find out that it has errors part way though. If I was able to step through the actions manually (even steps within a loop), I could see quickly that the data is not processing through and make amendments without having to run the whole flow/dataset

[Anonymous]

One thing that would help me a ton is if every initialized run counted as a run. Unfortunatly I can't troubleshoot or understand what error caused it not to run if I cannot see the errors because the errors are not shown unless it runs. It's also just weird that it doesn't show failed runs when the 28-day runs is the closest thing to a console log for troubleshooting. I'm unsure how anyone can use this if it won't show errors unless you have no errors. Weird.

[takolota]

Dataverse HTTP action

https://ideas.powerautomate.com/d365community/idea/bd4beb11-d4a6-4e62-96ea-4132b8d2fea0

There are many custom activities we could do with this, just like the SharePoint HTTP action. Without a way to authenticate through a Dataverse HTTP action, it’s too difficult & time-consuming for most users to request & set up an Azure account, create an Azure application, get admin consent for that application, discuss & adjust security settings with their IT department, and then finally set up the regular HTTP authentication in their flow before even getting to their actual HTTP call to perform something in Dataverse.

For example, we generally have batch CRUD options for SharePoint, Excel, SQL, & CSV, but there’s no way such a custom build could easily be shared & implemented with other users.

So this actually means things like Excel & SharePoint have a higher maximum daily automated throughput than Dataverse.

[stayinginsync]

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@Redders wrote:

Another way that the UI could be improved is to create a way to step through the automation and see what is happening at each stage. Many times have I needed to run a large flow just to find out that it has errors part way though. If I was able to step through the actions manually (even steps within a loop), I could see quickly that the data is not processing through and make amendments without having to run the whole flow/dataset

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I love this idea.   Yes, please.

[stayinginsync]

Another issue I recently struggled with was Microsoft Forms and SharePoint Managed Metadata.  Maybe this is an issue for Microsoft Forms instead of Flow, but there is no way to capture Managed Metadata values when a form is submitted.  In order to make it work, I had to

1. Create a list that mapped a plain text version of the answer to the Managed Metadata value
2. In the flow, look for the plain text response that matched the value in the list
3. Grab the Managed Metadata value in the Lookup table
4. Use that value to populate the SharePoint list capturing the Form data

[AngryAdmin]

Hi, first thing to improve might be to fix the feedback form.

If you type more than a few lines of text or take to long, it will simply fail with

Authentication Ticket Mismatched, failed authentication.

Can't be bothered to list all those terrible UI flaws a third time, but here is my basic suggestion:

Get people from the Visual Studio team to help with the UI, it is like heaven and hell in comparison.

The UI for building flows inside the browser is unstable, all kinds of things are broken, hard to reach, cursor jumping for no good reason, scollbars next to scrollbars next to scrollbars. The actual flows work nicely, but designing them through the web UI is really a nightmare.

[bgagnon]

Hi @AnnaChu 

First of all, Thank you for the opportunity to give our feed back. Also there are alot of worthy comment and great ideas. 

I stared using Power automate a week ago as a SharePoint Admin/designer. My first comment is the interface to managed all the flows from the entire enterprise (10 000 users)  is unusable. We have several thousand of flows and we can only browse through them in pages that will load one at a time. If we do a search for a users flows and the page where they stand is not yet loaded there will be no result. We need an interface where we can search the entire database.

Thank you,

../Bruno

[Dez_OC]

It would be amazing to have a break option, similar to debugging code where I can place a manual break in the flow somewhere without having to just use a terminate step, that way I can test out something and dive into the steps and analyze them manually, then continue on or end the flow if I found something wrong.

Thanks!

Dez

[Anonymous]

I’m curious, I know this is a long-shot and goes against the fundamental ethos of MS development cycle, but perhaps they can hire designers and have a design phase before development? Maybe even prototypes some things out and get some QA people involved who can explain their thoughts with design friendly language. Then after the design is in a good place THEN do the development.

[BrianS]

That sort of exists - you can put in a "Terminate" step and the Flow will stop there. You can designate the type of termination, even a custom one. You can use those to test parts of the Flow without running the entire thing. Not exactly the same, but it does come in handy

[Dez_OC]

Yep, and that was my point...I know we can do it that way, but that also forces you to end the task at the point rather than breaking to look at something, then continuing on after.  I use terminates now to look at each part as I develop it out, I'd just like more options to break and then continue.

[jaydog21]

I am having issues making a flow for a sharepoint list,  I have two columns i want to Multiply into the third column.  Help

[Redders]

@jaydog21,

You need to add a new message on this page https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Flows/bd-p/BuildingFlows 

Here is a good page to read before submitting your post 

How to write a good forum post

[cymorg1]

The expression designer needs improvement.  The display area is tiny and there are no built-in helpers (like you would see in MS Access).  As a result, long expressions are difficult to create/manage.  If the expression builder could pop out into another, bigger, element it would greatly improve the abilitiy to read these without copying/pasting them into a notepad. The icing on the cake would be proper intellisense built-in to that new element.

[bgagnon]

Hi @cymorg1 ,

you can activate experimental fonctionnalies to be able to have a larger expression windows.

..\Bruno

[takolota]

It would be much easier to help Microsoft help its users if the methods of sharing flows & other custom solutions across tenants didn’t have as many bugs.

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Power-Automate/Schedule-Recurrence-Trigger-Slows-Down-Fl...

[msabau]

It would be great to have a way to provide sample data to a flow while you're building it, instead of building, testing and then analizing the results.

I mean, let's say you make a connector with an expression that manipulates a string, it'd be great to provide the connector with some mock input and see the output in real time