Environment Variable changes not being picked up

[mikecollins]

Hi All,

I've just encountered an issue with Environment Variables, where my flows are not picking up changes to said variables.  After doing some searching, it seems that this is one of the limitations - changes to EV's are only picked by flows when they are turned off and back on again, or saved again.  Can anyone confirm this?

With this in mind, does anyone know if it would be possible to create a flow, that detects a change to an EV, and then iterates through all flows, in the current environment, and toggles them off and then on again - seems a bit of a contrived approach but would certainly be necessary in these situations.

Many thanks in advance

[Sundeep_Malik · Accepted solution]

Hey @mikecollins 

Yup, You will have turn on/off the flow or save the flow again manually after changing the environment variables.

So, I didnt find any way to know that environment variable has changed or not but what you can do is, create a separate flow. Whenever you change the value of environment variable. Run that flow.

In that flow you can add all the flows that need to turn off, then give some delay and then turn all the flows on. 

Or there is an alternative way instead of using environment variables.

You can make a dataverse table, In that table add S.No, then key and a value for that key. The key would act as the envionment variable name and the value, the value for it.

So, whenever you update it, it will be done for the entire environment and wherever you are using that dataverse table. So with this you wont have to turn on/off the flow. The flow will only see that a value in the database has changed. I hope you got this part, if not I can elaborate with an example.

I hope this helps 🙂

[mikecollins]

Hay - thanks for the reply.  I think I've come to the same conclusion. 

I started to build a manual flow, using the [List Flows as Admin] action to iterate through all Solution flows, in my environment and toggle them off/on.  Unfortunately I'm getting a 403 error "You are not permitted to make flows in this 'XXXXX'. Please switch to the default environment, or to one of your own environment(s), where you have maker permissions." which makes no sense since I clear can create flows in this environment.  Our admins are struggling a little to work out what permissions I'm missing.

[Sundeep_Malik]

@mikecollins 

I am not exactly sure about the security role would be required for this, but mostly system administrator does most of the work. Rest you can try environment admin/maker role too.