Power Automate Designer - Low Code, Novice and Citizen Developer Feedback

[AnnaChu]

The Power Automate Designer team would love to hear feedback from the perspective of novice Power Automate users, citizen developers and low coders on their experience with Power Automate Designer. When designing flows, what do they struggle most with? If this sounds like something you’ve heard someone mention, please forward them this pre-screening survey to complete: https://aka.ms/MPA_DesignerFeedback

@kishbuy238 and team are interested in hosting a screen-sharing session to identify opportunities to improve the experience. This survey will be open through to August.

[NWRST_NC]

Hi everyone,

I have been discovering over the last year Power Automate. We mainly use it in my French company for digitizing internal process such as employee need expression, employee evaluation, checking materials, beta preventive maintenance, .... We use Forms for sending mails and completing excel file. The impact of this app is very interesting for communcating and archiving information.

I give here some open suggestions, or even asking helps for these two following topics.

- I have tried to follow this tuto (https://learn.microsoft.com/fr-fr/power-automate/forms/popular-scenarios) for attaching a jpeg file in my emails from the Forms filling but I cannot manage to go until the end as I struggle on this line "first(Corps(’Parse_JSON’))?[’id’]" as Power Automate cannot recognize it. Help from someone? Or aother easier solution to attach the different files to en email generated in Power Automate?

- I cannot neither create a report from a Forms filling. This would be awesome if we could generate a report, according to a specific design, or at least if it will be possible to attach the PDF response of the forms in the email... You know, this PDF response we can print at the end of the forms filling.

Kind regards.

[briant]

I struggle most with debugging and monitoring potential issues. 

Mainly, the monitor page has no description or additional columns and need to click on each individual entry to see which flow.

The other issue is that i do not have enough options for terminate. It would be helpful if i knew if a flow ran and met all the conditions, or if a flow ran did not continue due to conditions being no.

[Shuvam-rpa]

@briant Agreed, it will be much better if at least we have flow name column in it..currently it show only flow id

[srduval]

@NWRST_NC if you are still having problems, create a new post in the general power automate discussion board with some screenshots of what your current configuration looks like and someone will be glad to help you. 

[srduval]

a global email when a flow fails would be great, instead of having to incorporate it into every flow I make it would be nice to have an email alert that a flow failed.

[CamCat]

Hi Anna,

I have a challenge on connecting to File System in Power Automate, and I have already installed On-premises data gateway, Service account is also created, still failed to connect to File Systemt.

Br. CamCat

[drummer]

@AnnaChu Further learning on email sends. Getting labels of fields for emails is especially tricky -needing to dig into code to find the solution.  So from say a simple D365 lookup name e.g.  Account Name, Record owner name, email. Easy way to link to the record vs. having to handle html a href.  I am sure you are working on this but this can be a huge barrier with amount of knowledge and digging for right code/solutions. The community though has been very vibrant and filling in gaps - I already have tabs of solutions in my onenote so maybe a cheatsheet like I have would be really good.  Enjoying the problem solving and automation overall though. Ty for asking. 

[drummer]

@AnnaChu For dataverse, ex. update a row in D365.  The null/non-null was tricky if you have a few lookups of optional fields. A member solved the if/then inside the field with concat and some simple json so fixing say lookup fields that are null/not null sometimes vs. having to branch if/thens or use code inside field - but at least if you could makes that code just work that would be very forgiving for a novice like me. 

[drummer]

For adoption of early users - Handle null dates in DateTime.

So now I've been about 6 mos into powerautomate mostly with Dynamics.  For improvement I think highly promote the use of DateTime for format/changes.  However, if you could solve the ability for DateTime to handle a null value for dynamics 365 users that would make adoption so much smoother -many frustrations trying to use expressions, etc and branch logic just to handle a simple null field. 

[RIYxWRK]

It's not low code at all. It may not be command based but users MUST have a programming or developer background which goes against the advertised use cases. Even the most simple actions need workaround and hacks to get the results you need (datavere is an absolute pain to work with). I write this as a novice user. I am not a programmer or app developer but power Automate and Power Apps require me to be.

[wideneruwebdev]

Hi Anna, I wish I could move/nest purple initialize variable action blocks together in a corralled brown scope control block so I dont have to scroll down past 30 purple action blocks all the time just to work in my logic actions

[Zitallis]

@AnnaChu I wish there are some screen sharing sessions or a line we can call for us non-coders/programmers to reach someone who can help us further.  

[David_MA]

Business Owner Role

A business owner role should be added to flows in addition to run only and full owner roles. The business owner would be able to see the flow history of each run, cancel flows and resubmit flow runs. They would not be able to edit or delete a flow, however. This would allow designated user to have more insight into open requests and where they are at in a process so that they do not need to ask an owner for the status of a flow run.

[spmofulton]

@AnnaChu Is this survey still open?  My organization is trying to get started with power automate.  

[drummer]

@AnnaChu Another simplification after fixing Null fields would be to add to Date Time a Count Days, Years, Minutes to avoid div(sub(....