No names in this story have been changed to protect the innocent—or was it to protect the guilty? Or to expose the innocent? Anyway, read on. When Megan V. Walker (her real name) asks a question, others listen because it’s often a non-trivial challenge. I have two tables, both with a file column. I want to use Power Automate to move the file from TABLE A to the corresponding field on TABLE B. (Easy, right? Not so fast! – g.d.) (more…) The post Tip #1458: How to copy files between Dataverse tables appeared first on Power Platform & Dynamics CRM Tip Of The Day ..read more

It’s not a secret that these days, data float around in automation using the JSON format. Submit a form, get JSON back. It is not human- (or any other carbon-based life form-) friendly. { "First Name": "Nancy", "Last Name": "Davolio", "Age": 42, "Influencer": true, "Customer": "Balderdash Primary School", "CustomerPONo": "PO100042810", "SalesOrderNo": "sy039978" } My fellow Power Automate Gymnast, Amey “CI-J” Holden, asked if a code-only connector can be created to help produce nicely formatted emails containing form submission results. And it occurred to me that the JSON Extractor CoC ..read more

tl;dr Use Extract JSON code only connector to select only a subset of object properties matching specified regular expression. (more…) The post Tip #1456: Enumerate and extract object properties appeared first on Power Platform & Dynamics CRM Tip Of The Day ..read more

While experimenting in a flow trying to find that elusive expression or action, I often catch myself doing this: The problem is, of course, I don’t bother setting Run After conditions and the result often looks like this: Now I have to edit, figure out what’s wrong, run again and again as I didn’t get to even try three other steps. If you find yourself doing the same mind-numbing experimental activities, make it a habit to use parallel branches! Add a parallel branch or two and rearrange the existing flow. The execution nails one of the actions as a solution in a single run! You can conti ..read more

tl;dr Access Azure blob metadata in two steps: obtain a SAS URI, then make an HTTP request — HEAD to read or PUT to write. Accessing index tags isn’t straightforward; secure a SAS URI that permits tag manipulation elsewhere, then return to complete the task. (more…) The post Tip #1454: Azure Blob metadata and index tags in Power Automate appeared first on Power Platform & Dynamics CRM Tip Of The Day ..read more

Today’s tip is from Eric Regnier. (Have a tip of your own? Send it to jar@crmtipoftheday.com) Ever wondered if you had the latest and greatest version of the Plugin Registration Tool (PRT) or Configuration Migration Tool (CMT)? And always had to Google Bing Copilot it to find and download the tool? You can now just pac it! From any console like VS Code or PowerShell, just type pac tool prt for PRT and pac tool cmt for CMT. You can also launch Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) and the Marker portal from pac, run pac tool admin and pac tool maker, respectively ..read more

tl;dr Always use formatDateTime(), substring(), convertFromUtc(), convertTimeZone() to drop the time part and ensure the dates are in the same timezone. !tl;dr The datetime isn’t of any special type in Power Automate; it’s just a string representation of a timestamp in an ISO format. Yes, the format is sortable, so in theory, you could compare just the values. However, if you have a date input parameter in your flow, it comes as a date without any time part, so you might miss that birthday when comparing it to utcNow()! To further complicate matters, datetime values include both the time porti ..read more

There is no easy way to calculate aggregates in Power Automate (except count, of course, which technically, is an aggregate). You do have a few options available to you: loop over the array and apply hideous formulas forgotten since the statistics/SQL course, use Graph API and bring magic of Excel formulas, use third-party connectors (which is not a bad option if you already paying for them). If your data coming from Dataverse you can use FetchXml. SharePoint data can be wrestled with CAML aggregations (yes, it’s a real thing). You can probably even cook some joujou with xml transforms. Enter ..read more

In another universe we did talk about Tip #545: Create non-interactive user like a boss. Since then, the product name has changed at least 27 times, Marketing Pilot and Parature came and went, Dataflex and CDS left their mark but, most importantly, we’ve got ourselves app users based on service principals. It’s been quite a painful manual process creating those users: in Azure portal create an app registration, create a secret, add API permissions – NO, STOP DOING IT PEOPLE, IT’S NOT NEEDED, forget to copy the secret, go back 2 steps, generate new secret, switch to Dataverse admin, create an a ..read more

Formula columns are great, just read Work with Dataverse formula columns. But there are some limitations in the Power Fx functions you can use, as well as with the return types. Need a formula that returns: Whole number? Make it a decimal with 0 precision. Currency? Make a formula to return a decimal, then convert it to currency using the good old calculated column where you can define the return data type instead of inferring. Choice? Your choice can only be either yes or no. But the same trick applies. Do your magic in a formula column, then create a calculated column and go through the pai ..read more