Apps Summary

In this activity, we learnt about the power and extensibility of Microsoft Flow.

Flow has over 200 prebuilt connectors and also allows for custom connectors. It’s a cloud service that automates actions across one or more systems. Using Microsoft Flow, you have at your fingertips a modern workflow engine providing increased flexibility for your Dynamics platform.

There are different types of flow triggers: instant flows and automated flows.

We learnt about building button flows to perform actions, such as send me a reminder in 10 minutes.

We reviewed conditions and switches: conditions offered true and false branch-based outcomes on an evaluation of some criteria. While a switch, on the other hand, offers multiple branches based on the value of a data item.

When we covered other flow concepts, we learnt about setting variables. These can be set, incremented, or decremented depending on their data type. These can be used in a condition criteria. We use them to hold a value that you planned to use later.

We briefly looked at the importance of naming your flows. It can seem like such a minor thing to spend time on, however, a little pre-work here saves you a whole lot of headaches later.

One of the most important tasks in building a flow is testing. Microsoft Flow has a built-in testing feature to make it easier to interactively do testing of flows. This means a common pattern for flow modifications becomes Modify –> Test –> Review Results –> Repeat.

We also learnt about working with CDS using connectors and triggers. We talked about setting the scope, which could include organisation, business unit and child business unit or user.

We also took a deep dive into working with dates, keeping in mind that Microsoft Flow does not have a specific date and time data type and that all date and time values in flow are in UTC time.

We discussed how to build a flow and starting from apps, such as a Canvas app or model-driven.

We looked at building a flow and learning when a record is selected. This trigger allows building flows that show up in the model-driven user experience and can be started on demand by a user.