Share Connections in Power App

[ananthkrishna99]

Hi All,

I have created a Power App which is connected to DevOps(connected to my account while creating), I have shared this App with my friend. When he opened that App it asked him to authorize the DevOps connection. Now DevOps connection I used the account is connected using his account. But he can't use the App because he don't access to DevOps Project I used in the App. So, is it possible to use a Service Principle/ Service Account to create a connection, so that use don't need to have access to the DevOps.

Regards,

Ananth

[Srini84]

Yes, it is possible to use a service principal/service account to create a connection between your Power App and DevOps, so that your friend does not need to have access to DevOps.

To create a service principal in DevOps, you can follow these steps:

• Navigate to your DevOps organization's settings and click on "Service connections" under the "Pipelines" section.
• Click on the "New service connection" button and select "Azure Resource Manager" from the list of options.
• In the "Azure Resource Manager" dialog box, select "Service principal (manual)" as the authentication method.
• Fill out the required fields to create the service principal. You will need to provide a name for the connection, the Azure subscription ID, the tenant ID, the client ID, and the client secret.
• Once you have filled out the required fields, click on the "Verify connection" button to test the connection. If the connection is successful, click on the "Save" button to create the service connection.

After you have created the service principal and the Azure Resource Manager service connection in DevOps, you can use it in your Power App by following these steps:

• Open your Power App in edit mode and navigate to the "Data" tab.
• Click on "Connections" and then click on the "New connection" button.
• Search for "Azure Resource Manager" in the list of available connectors and select it.
• Select the service connection that you created earlier and click on the "Connect" button.
• You can now use this connection in your Power App to access DevOps resources without requiring your friend to have access to DevOps.

Note:  You may need to update your DevOps project permissions to grant the necessary permissions to the service principal/service account for it to access the required resources.

[iAm_ManCat]

@Srini84 Have you tried this or ever done this yourself? or did chatGPT say this?

You can take just one look at the ARM connection documentation, under Default, where it says

"This is not shareable connection. If the power app is shared with another user, another user will be prompted to create new connection explicitly."

@heaher_italent 99.98% chance this was written using a GPT3 model based on analysis

[iAm_ManCat · Accepted solution]

Hi @ananthkrishna99 

Power Apps connections always use the user's context unless the connector is designed to use separate connection details.

In your case you are using DevOps, which has a connector but it will access DevOps as that user - from within Power Apps I do not believe there is a way to get service principal access to your DevOps instance without giving every user the service principal details so that they can create the connection to Azure Resource manager when they open the App. This presents its own issues as you will be sharing the secret and other details with the end user.

@WarrenBelz can you think of any way to achieve this that I'm maybe not aware of?

Cheers,

Sancho

[WarrenBelz]

Thanks for the tag @iAm_ManCat ,

I agree with you in fact struck the consequences of this with a non-MS connector last week when I connected a Flow to an app.