Error with desktop flow using SharePoint connection either between owners of the flow or environments

[cwischnewski]

I see something like this in either of two scenarios.  First scenario is where one user creates desktop flow using SharePoint actions and then shares the flow as co-owner with another user.  The second user sees errors on each SharePoint line saying something like "Parameter 'Connection reference': The underlying connection for connection reference 'Cr1aee6_shared_sharepointonline_8b5c32f1' wasn't found."  There seems to be no way to share this connection from the make.powerautomate.com Connections area.  So this new user creates their own connection, changes each step.  And saves their changes.  Then the first user opens the flow and now they see these errors, so they change all the connections back to original!

But the second scenario is more problematic.  Using that flow described above, add it to a solution, export as managed solution, import into the production environment, and the same thing happens.  You need to create a new connection here too.

Then, if you consider the Update item action and the impact that changing the connection wipes out a number of the variable references from the earlier Get item step that had to be re-referenced, and this makes using the dev/prod environment solution process near impossible.

So consider the flow has an input variable for strRequestID of the SharePoint item we want to do something with.  First step is Get item using that ID and store into respGetItem.  Then we want to do an Update item to change a status value to Completed.  Sounds easy, but we have 30 or so fields, so we need to do things on the Update item step like assign Title: %respGetItem.Title% and so on for about 30 fields.  But when we reset the connections, all these Update item values using that respGetItem variable are cleared out.

So first, am I missing something about either sharing the connection between users or environments.  Second, if sharing isn't possible, is there a better way to handle the Get item variable resetting losing the stuff for the Update item step?

[cwischnewski]

I had an idea to at least ease the pain point of the Update Item getting reset when the new connections get selected but it isn't working.  I tried to use an intermediary object variable, but the Update fails.  So something like:

Get item store into respGetItem

Convert JSON to custom object convert JSON respGetItem to custom object objGetItem

Update item now using things like %objGetItem.Title%

This allowed me to set it up.  But it failed to perform the Update.  Also, when I tried switching the users to test if it kept things that failed too, the issue is re-setting the connection of the Update item step is resetting all the parameters, it isn't related to the prior response variable. 

So I appears when moving environments, I have to manually re-point the connection reference and then on the Update item step I have to manually reenter all the parameters' values.