Automatically move to next Business Process Flow Stage when a field is updated

[ginnyh]

Hi, I'm not sure I'm choosing the right location for this question, but please redirect me if it's not.

We're building a model-driven app, and want to move the business process flow forward to the next stage when an assignment is made (i.e., when the owner changes).  I've been able to make this work using this process: 

How to change BPF stages automatically using workflow in Dynamics 365 – Dynamics 365 CE/Power Platfo...

But, it uses the Process (Workflow) and I think that method is being deprecated? There is a message at the top of the Process edit page to use Microsoft Flow instead. I'm somewhat familiar with Flow, but I don't think I can recreate this Process in Flow? 

Can anyone advise on the currently recommended way to do this? Can I do it in Flow and I'm just being clueless? 🙂

[Anonymous]

Hi there! 

I see it's an old post, but sharing my findings as I'm in a similar position. 

You have the option to move to the next stage with Power Automate by updating the review entity for your process. This article describes one good method of doing it, however it's with hardcoded values for the next stages. (something that's not ideal if you are working in multiple environments - dev,int,qa, etc.)

I'm also looking for an elegant way of moving to the next stage of a BPF automatically upon item creation and without the use of workflows, so if anyone else has more insights, I'm following this topic. 

Cheers!

[Anonymous]

Hi again folks, 

The "elegant" way I found to have the values fetched between environments is by querying the Process & Process Stage entities. 

From there you can compose the two values you need to advance the case - TraversedPath & TargetStageID. 

Once you have those - you just update the record with the new values from above, and voila! Case moved to the needed stage. 

Note that the the TraversedPath is a coma-separated string of stage IDs. It indicates which stages the case has been to. So, when you update the case to move to the new stage, concatenate the new stage ID to the TraversedPath of the record.

Below is a snapshot of my implementation: 

1. Get Process & Get Stages fetches the Process & Stage IDs from my custom process table & the Process Stages entity.

2. Set variable & Apply to each just set the TraversedPath & StageID variables. (I'm using Apply to each as I have 2 stages I'm interested in and I extract the IDs in separated variables that is needed for my business requirement)

3. After I have the StageID & ProcessID I just update the case with the new values. Note the concatenation on the TraversedPath field:

concat(variables('TraversedPath'),',',variables('StageID'))

[Aeathiel]

Thank you for follow-up! 🙂 I have similar issue - but can't get the update row to work. Following error = The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Any ideas?

[Anonymous]

Hi Aeathiel, 

Sorry for the late reply, hope my reply is still relevant. 🙂 

Check which is the item you are trying to update and if you have the correct GUID. As the message states, this occurs if the item is removed or improper selector is used while trying to update it.

[prajaktamalusar]

Hey you can check this out and see if this solves the problem.

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osl7HKnPtB0