One solution to Form list not refreshing in Trigger Form action

[iso]

As with on-prem SQL connections that do not refresh for more than 24 hours, so does Form connection also suffer from this.  Let's say you have to recreate a form that is identical to the old one because you did not know that to link an Excel worksheet to a Form you must start the Form from within Excel Online and not the Form app.  Let's also say that you did a few experiments with forms, creating half a dozen forms and then deleting them.  These forms now sit in the Form recycling bin (bear with me as this is going to become very relevant).

So now you have 2 forms and let's say they also have the exact same name.  The original form is linked to by a cloud flow in a form trigger.  So now you go to the form drop-down list and select the new form, but you have to guess which is which because of the name issue.  Let's say after trial and error you finally guess which one is the new form.  But now 2 issues crop up:

1_ the form list is populated with all the forms you have created, even those who are currently in the Form recycling bin, as mentioned above.

2_ after selecting the newly created form and running the flow, whatever was cached from previous runs with the old form (still same name) is interfering with the data coming from the new form and mixes everything up making a downright mess.

Beginning of a solution (until MS fixes this):

1_go into the Form Recycle bin AND delete all forms in there--this seems to force a connection refresh somehow in the Flow connection (unfortunately there is no global select, so you will have to select each file one by one).

2_leave the Recycling bin, force a page refresh (CTRL-SHIFT-F5 in Chrome)

3_check you only have the forms that are supposed to be ready to go to production

4_come back to your Flow and check that now the form list is indeed showing what you got in your Form folder (when I write 'Form', I mean the online Form app you get with Office 365)
5_select the Form you want to link to
6_go through all actions of your flow that reference the same form fields from the previous form, delete these references, and replace them by clicking Dynamic content and clicking on each field in the list that is shown in the Dynamic content dialog.  

7_finally, after wasting more than 2 hours or so on this (for a flow with more than 50 actions), the flow logic should work again.

[Pstork1 · Accepted solution]

Deleting the trigger and connection will do essentially the same thing.  The problem is that it will delete all the references to the form inside the flow. But I suspect your solution does that as well.  The problem is that when you make the connection it caches the schema of the data source.  All the data sources act that way.  The only way to refresh it in Power Automate is delete the connection or wait until tomorrow.  This is baked into the connection design and I doubt you will see a fix for it.  The best you can hope for is that MS adds a manual connection refresh like the one in Power Apps.

[iso]

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@Pstork1 wrote:

The best you can hope for is that MS adds a manual connection refresh like the one in Power Apps.

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Yes, that's exactly what I am hoping for, silly me.  🤔