Very new to Power Automate combined with Dynamics - a Hello and some general questions if I may.

[Dan_B]

Good morning, Afternoon, evening all.

I'm Dan, from the UK, and (This sounds like a self help sessions!) have been tasked with looking at using Power Automate predominantly to try and remove a load of manual tasks from their day to day life.

Firstly to save them loads of time, and make sure things are done in a timely manner, and also vastly reduces the chances of human error.

I spent some time with one of the highly skilled developers last autumn, or fall if you prefer, but due to work commitments since then have not been able to put much into practice.

I did start it just before Christmas, but I have to be honest I've been feeling pretty under pressure, and like I was getting nowehre fast - inflaming the situation is that we are all working from home remotely currently, where as in the old world I would and could have sat down with my manager/colleagues and friends and tried to bounce some ideas around to make some progress.

Instead I have been trying my best at home (Which is my own fault) and not getting anywhere as far along as I would like - I'm still on my first flow!

I spent 2.5 hours this afternoon with my manager this afternoon which was REALLY useful, so good to have a 2nd pair of eyes, plus he has a lot of dynamics experience, as well as the workflows in Dynamics, and these seem to be along the same lines construction wise.

I guess I'm asking if there are any failsafe, or goto methods you guys and gals use, that help you in the day to day creation of flows.

I have over 100 to create, but suspect a lot of them will be fairly similar format wise, so many can be created from a template, with a few alterations, but at the moment I am starting from nothing.

My biggest challenge currently is probably fairly basic, trying to figure out what Actions to use in the flow - is there a reliable one for 'getting data' out of the dynamics system?

The developer I spoke with said you had to perform a get data action or actions, and then you could refer to these in subsequent steps when you wanted to pull certain values back, such as contact e-mail details for example.

To give some idea of what my first task is:

We have a property sales form - when 3 of these fields (Adverturllink = notnull, advertdate = notnull, advertlisted = yes) have the value updated/populated, we want the system to pick this up, generate an e-mail to come from a generic inbox, and then e-mail the current property owner from a template to say that the listing is live, and here is the URL etc.

Has anyone created e-mail templates within Dynamics, and then know how to reference them within the Flow, presumably there is some kind of template identifier by which you can call the template, but perhaps I need to perform a get data beforehand to give me access.

Sorry if this is all a bit of a jumble and a brain dump, and this may all be too much all at once, but feeling a bit more optimistic after todays session, and wanted to see if I could further my good mood!

Thank you in advance,

Dan

[Mira_Ghaly]

Hi @Dan_B 

I will try to answer briefly your questions:

My biggest challenge currently is probably fairly basic, trying to figure out what Actions to use in the flow - is there a reliable one for 'getting data' out of the dynamics system?

To work with Dynamics system you need to use the CDS(Current Environment Connector)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/commondataserviceforapps/

We have a property sales form - when 3 of these fields (Adverturllink = notnull, advertdate = notnull, advertlisted = yes) have the value updated/populated, we want the system to pick this up, generate an e-mail to come from a generic inbox, and then e-mail the current property owner from a template to say that the listing is live, and here is the URL etc.

You need to setup your flow to work on the trigger when a row is created updated or deleted

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/commondataserviceforapps/#when-a-row-is-created,-updated...

You need to set the filtering attributes to the above fields so it only triggers it when any of these fields are changed; of course you need to Supply Schema Names of these attributes and also you need to add Filter Expression so it applies your condition above , to Generate the filter expression it needs to be an ODATA Filter Expression.

Please check below about using Data Filters

https://sharepains.com/2019/06/10/microsoft-flow-filter-queries-in-the-list-records-action-in-the-co...

Has anyone created e-mail templates within Dynamics, and then know how to reference them within the Flow, presumably there is some kind of template identifier by which you can call the template, but perhaps I need to perform a get data beforehand to give me access.

You can check the below Nice Video that describes how to generate a template and use it in Power Automate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZk1shxuYIM

And Also this Blog Post

https://www.inogic.com/blog/2020/09/power-automate-send-an-email-using-the-email-template-part-1/

Hope this gives a Kick Start and Good Luck in your Journey!

[Dan_B]

Hello @Mira_Ghaly thankyou so much for taking the time to make such a detailed reply, to what I fully appreciate was a pretty vague set of questions.

I've already had a look at some of the links you kindly posted, and I think there is a lot of information in there that will be VERY useful to me, thank you so much.

One thing I forgot to mention is that I was told I could use code from fetchxml within the Query section, but that currently that has been erroring for me, saying it can't find the entity.

I know the code must be right, as I created an advanced find in dynamics, saved it, and then opened it up within fetchxml - I also tried just downloading it direct from the browser, and this also seemed to work, so not sure if one method is favourable over the other or not?

I suspect my issue was caused by the lack of the Current Environment Connector, so that will be my next port of call.

I've set up a solution, and if I understand it correctly, I need to create the flow from within that solution.

Thanks again & I will likely come back to bore you with the outcome 🙂

Dan

[Mira_Ghaly]

@Dan_B

YEs it is always recommended to create any component from within a solution so that you can easily later move across environments. 

To use the FetchXML in your List rows action is only supported in CDS current environment connector.