Linn's Power Platform Notebook

This is the third post in a three-part series of File field as input and SharePoint as storage. You can check out the other posts via these links (Part 1, Part 2)
Customising the document upload dialog box for the purpose of adding an additional field to capture the metadata of the uploaded document is a common ask in the community forums. Now in one of my previous blog posts about How to Add Metadata to SharePoint Document Subgrid in Dynamics 365, I also got a question in the comment section.
Is there a way to add custom column (field) on the Upload Document popup on Dynamics 365? Also, on the custom column (field) on the Edit Document Properties popup on Dymanics 365?
That was a good question for that blog post since the solution was only about showing the custom metadata in the SharePoint Document Subgrid and there is no easy way to allow the user to enter the custom metadata during the file upload.

As of now, there is no suppor…

This is the second post in a three-part series of File field as input and SharePoint as storage. You can check out the other posts via these links (Part 1, Part 3) Using the File field in Business Process Flow for uploading of documents Sometimes, the new functionalities introduced to the Common Data Service (CDS) platform is not immediately supported in the no-code functionality of the model-driven apps and only through supported API in the beginning. For example, column comparison can be used in queries using FetchXML, Web API, or the SDK API but it is not available in UI components like advanced filtering panel (or Advanced Find), view designer, etc. Another example is the Multi Select Option Set which is still not supported in Workflow, Business Rule or Business Process Flow. But somehow, File datatype which was introduced at the end of last year was already available in the Business Process Flow (BPF) as soon as it was made available in the model-driven app w…

This is the first post in a three-part series of File field as input and SharePoint as storage. You can check out the other posts via these links (Part 2, Part 3) What is a File field and how you can use it Microsoft has added the File and Image datatypes to Common Data Service last year which was only available in canvas apps first, and then was later on made available in the model-driven app with 2020 Release Wave 1. If you want to know more details about adding the file datatype field into a custom entity, check out this 2 minute Tuesday video by Gus Gonzalez. In that video, Gus briefly explained the point of using the file field to store a document as opposed to storing the file using the Notes entity or the SharePoint document library related to the entity. Jukka Niiranen also wrote a blog post on why would you store images and files in CDS. If the file is uploaded as a Note attachment or SharePoint document, it will be a challenge for the system to verify if the n…

Sometimes when we are debugging flows, we want some of the steps to be disabled/skipped and ignored by the Power Automate engine so that those actions are not triggered while we are still working on the other parts of the flow. But currently, there is no way in Power Automate to disable the steps for testing/debugging scenarios (yet) even though the Power Automate team has been working on making this feature available since mid of March last year.

What this post is not about. This is not about how to add comments to the flow steps.


What this post isabout. This is about how to disable or exclude the steps in the flow action without deleting the step so that the steps can be re-enabled / re-used later. (which is equivalent to the programming term “comment out” the code for switching off a chunk of code temporarily)
Quote from Wiki: A common developer practice is to comment out a code snippet, meaning to add comment syntax causing that block of co…

There are several ways on how you can access the flow run history in Power Automate. In fact, to make things easier for me, I created a solution and wrote a blog post about how to Access Flow Run History within a Record in Dynamics 365/CDS (check that out if that is of interest). However, the solution I did is not for everyone especially if there are tons of existing flows in the system already. 
Another quick way to access the flow run (especially for those who need to find the flow run with the record ID for troubleshooting purposes) is by exporting the flow run history and find (Ctrl + F) the record GUID in the .csv file to identify the URL of a particular run. But this approach has a limitation as it only returns the last 100 records.
With Stefan Strube's custom connector to get flow run history, I created an on-demand flow to find the flow runs by providing the name of the flow and GUID of the record.
Here is the summary of the flow: Get the WorkflowIdUniq…