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Rajesh
Advocate II
Advocate II

ALM practices for building flow and powerapps

Hi

 

I'm planning on building flows and powerapps using SharePoint as data source. I'm looking for best practices on building, testing and deploying these solutions on different environments. I'm able to create additional CDS environments like dev, pre-prod etc. through flow/powerapps admin center and I can choose these environments for building and deploying these apps.

 

However what I'm not clear is how do I isolate my connections to SharePoint lists across these environments. for e.g. say I have a flow in dev environment and I need to access a SharePoint list, I specify the site url and SharePoint list name and I'll end up testing my flow against a specific site and list. If I deploy the flow to pre-prod or prod, the flow will still be running against the same SharePoint list unless I go ahead and edit the flow to use a different list that's meant to be used in the respective environment. This is an issue esp when making changes and testing in dev environment before releasing to live. Though I've different environments to deploy the flow, they all point to the same SharePoint site and list. So currently what I do in order to test any changes made in dev is to turn off the flow in live and turn on the flow in dev environment. I'm looking for some best practice guidance here as to how I can isolate the SharePoint and flow envrionments altogether - dev flow accesses dev SharePoint tenant, live flow accesses live SharePoint tenant etc.

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Hi @Rajesh ,

 

If you would like to isolate the SharePoint and Flow environments, you may need to have a SharePoint tenant site for each of the corresponding CDS environment. And once the flow is imported into the target environment, manually edit the flow to set the SharePoint site and list to the corresponding SharePoint tenant.

 

Hope this make sense.

 

Best regards,

Mabel

 

Community Support Team _ Mabel Mao
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

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v-yamao-msft
Community Support
Community Support

Hi @Rajesh ,

 

It seems that you are trying to export and import flows using Solutions.

With our solution imported, we need to wire-up connections for the triggers and actions. By default, when new flows are imported, they will be in a disabled state since connections still need to be established. Upon establishing connections and saving the flow, the flow will become active.

About your scenario, after you imported the solutions from dev environment to prod environment, you need to update the connections and lists in the prod environment.

Besides, you cannot save changes to a flow that is activated. You need to deactivate it first either from the Solutions experience or from the flow maker portal by turning the flow off.

The following blog for your reference:

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/solutions-in-microsoft-flow/

 

Best regards,

Mabel

 

Community Support Team _ Mabel Mao
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

Hi @v-yamao-msft 

 

Thanks for yr reply. My issue is not so much with the connection. I know that connection has to be setup before I can import the flow into target environment. My issue is with hard coded SharePoint urls and list settings that are embedded in the flow and changing them as we progress the flow from environment to another.  Should I be having a SharePoint tenant site for each of the corresponding CDS environment and once the flow is imported into the target environment edit the flow to set the SharePoint url/list to the corresponding SharePoint tenant url? I'm looking for some supported ways and best practices around this.

 

In a normal bespoke solution we would have managed these kind of settings through configuration settings. 

Hi @Rajesh ,

 

If you would like to isolate the SharePoint and Flow environments, you may need to have a SharePoint tenant site for each of the corresponding CDS environment. And once the flow is imported into the target environment, manually edit the flow to set the SharePoint site and list to the corresponding SharePoint tenant.

 

Hope this make sense.

 

Best regards,

Mabel

 

Community Support Team _ Mabel Mao
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.
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