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Demonstration – Build a Microsoft Flow
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OK, we’re here in the flow portal. And what I’m going to do is go ahead and build a flow. And this is going to be a very simple flow. It’s going to be a button flow that is going to accept a name. We’re going to, then, use the CDS connector to create a account entity in CDS with our flow. Let’s go ahead and get started. I’m going to go to solutions. And for our purposes, I’m going to use the common data service solution, which right now, should be empty. We’re going to go ahead and go to New. We’re going to go down to Flow. It’s going to launch the Flow Designer.
I’m going to go ahead and choose the button trigger, Flow Button for Mobile. Now, I’m actually going to run this in the browser. You can also run it in the mobile application if you instal it. I could also search for other connectors that I want to use as the trigger. But I’m going to go ahead and use the Flow button. And we’ll talk more about the Flow button in some of the options as we dive a little bit deeper in this module. I’m going to add an input name. So I’m going to click that. I’m going to click Text. I’m going to call this, Name.
And I’m going to do a new step because once I get the name, I want to create a record. So I’m a search for the accommodator service, Create a Record. I’m going to select the default environment. We’ll talk more about environment’s a little bit later. We’re going to pick accounts. And then I’m going to fill out only the account name. I’m going to actually use the name that was provided by me in the input trigger. And I’m going to go ahead and give a name to my flow. Now, if I don’t give a name to my flow, it will generate one for me with a combination of the trigger and the first connector it uses.
I want something a little bit more meaningful. So we’ll call this, let’s see, Button - Create Account, something that I might remember when I look at it later. And we’ll go ahead and save this. OK, we’re going to go ahead and go back. Now, we’re looking at our flow. We can see that it’s on. We’re going to go ahead and click the Run Now. And it will run this flow in our browser. Now, the first time you run a flow, it’s going to prompt you for consent for it if you didn’t already have a connection.
Like, if this was somebody else running it, then they would be prompted to log into the CDS or to provide their credentials if it was a connector that needed it. But I’m going to go ahead and say Continue. Now, it wants to know the name. I’m going to say, Contoso, Inc. And I’m going to go ahead and run the flow. Now, once the flow has run, I can go look at the progress on it. So I’m going to go follow that link. And it’s going to show me the history of any that have run. I’ve got one instance that has run 7 seconds ago. And I’m going to go ahead and drill into that and look at it.
And what I’ll see is, basically, the steps in my flow with either a green, a red, or a black telling me what’s happened. In this case, green is good. Red is normally bad. Black just means that the step didn’t run. If I look at one of these, I can see what was passed in. So this is a good way to kind of understand what your flow is doing. I can see that the name was passed in as Contoso. I can expand my Create Record. And I can see that a record created with Contoso, it passed a few of the other fields in that were required that all took the defaults.
And it’s going to show me what was created after it. And you can see that it got an item ID and several things were set with default values. And in fact, if I jump over to the Power Apps portal and look at the account entity and look at the data– these are my existing records. We don’t see Contoso on there. Well, actually, we see Contoso Pharmaceuticals. But we’re looking for Contoso, Inc. I’m going to go and refresh my data. And we can see that now we have a Contoso, Inc., record. So our flow works. So that’s, basically, building a very simple flow that’s now in my solution, ready to be deployed to my test and my production environments.
And we’ll come back a little bit later and look at some of the other features that you can use when building a flow.
In this activity, we’re going to create aflow in the in the flow portal. This going to be a very simple flow.
It’s going to be a button flow that is going to accept a name. We’re going to then use the CDS connector to create an account entity in CDS with our flow.
Watch the video demonstration for an understanding of how to create this flow.
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After watching the demonstration, what do you think the benefits of working with Microsoft Flow are?Use the discussion section below and let us know your thoughts. Try to respond to at least one other post and once you’re happy with your contribution, click the Mark as complete button to check the step off, then you can move to the next step.
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Dynamics 365: Working with Power Platform Automation
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Dynamics 365: Working with Power Platform Automation
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