Cloud Flow – Nishant Rana's Weblog

Open a Power Automate Flow for Edit Without Fixing Broken Connections First

While reviewing Power Automate flows recently, we ran into an issue where we could not open a flow in edit mode

When opening the flow, Power Automate displayed the “This flow will connect to” screen and requested that we fix one or more connections before proceeding.

In our case, the flow contained an Office 365 Outlook connection reference that required attention. The problem was that we did not have access to create or repair that connection. Because of this, the Continue button remained disabled and we were unable to open the flow designer to understand what the flow actually did.

At first glance, it appeared that fixing the connection was the only option. However, in our scenario, we were simply analyzing existing flows to understand their purpose and determine whether they were still required.Repairing the Outlook connection would have required additional investigation, coordination with the appropriate users, and potentially creating or reassigning connection references. Since our immediate goal was only to review the flow logic, spending time resolving the connection issue first did not make sense.

Fortunately, we found another approach that allowed us to access the flow designer without fixing the connection immediately.

Instead of trying to fix the connection, open the flow’s Details page. From the details page, locate the Connections section and select Edit.

Next, add your user account as a Co-owner of the flow.

Once we added our user account as a co-owner, we refreshed the page and tried opening the flow again.This time, we were able to open the flow designer and review the flow logic even though the Outlook connection issue was not resolved.

Seems that adding our account as a co-owner provides the permissions required to access and inspect the flow. This simple workaround can save considerable time when reviewing large numbers of flows across an environment.

Hope it helps..

Advertisements

Flows getting triggered multiple times / missing callbackregistration record – Power Automate / Dataverse

Recently, we observed that one of our flows was getting triggered multiple times in our UAT environment; however, the flow was working properly in our Development environment.

A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

On comparing the flows trigger, we didn’t find any differences.

However, when checking for the callbackregistration record, we observed that for the Dev env, we had the callbackregistration record available.

However, it was missing for our UAT environment.

Turning the flow on and off didn’t create the corresponding callbackregistration record.

https://nishantrana.me/2025/09/02/fixed-flow-not-getting-triggered-incorrect-callback-registration-record-power-automate-dataverse/

Eventually, we deleted the trigger and recreated it in the UAT.

After recreating the trigger, we could see our flow getting triggered only once as expected.

However, we also noticed that the name of the callbackregistration record was not just the GUID, but it also had MTA suffixed to it in our UAT.

daf9fae3-a405-ee11-8f6e-00224817f864:MTA

So may this record was already existing and had an incorrect filter expression, which got fixed when we deleted and created a new trigger.

We also deleted this callbackregistration record, and turned our flow on and off. This created a new callbackregistration record with the same MTA suffixed to it.

So the solution here could be to find the callbackregistration record either with a GUID or with MTA suffixed to it, delete the record found, and turn the flow on and off.

Hope it helps..

Advertisements

Fixed – Flow not getting triggered / incorrect callback registration record (Power Automate / Dataverse)

Recently, we faced an interesting issue, where we updated an existing flow in our Dev, basically we removed the Filter Rows condition and deployed it to UAT.

Before –

Now –

In our Dev, it was working fine, getting triggered on the update of the field specified in the Select Columns; however, after deployment to UAT, it was still getting triggered only on the old filter condition, which we had already removed.

Turning off and on the Cloud Flow didn’t help.

The client data did not have the Filter rows condition.

Interestingly, we can still see the filter expression existing for the callback registration record of that flow in our UAT.

Eventually, we deleted the Callback registration record, turned the flow off and on, and it created the correct Callback Registration record with filter expression as null this time.

A computer screen shot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This fixed the issue, and our flow got triggered correctly.

Advertisements

When Do We Use the ActivityParty.AddressUsed Property for Emails in Power Automate (Dataverse)

When we automate emails in Dataverse using Power Automate, we deal with something called Activity Party. It manages the participants of an email—whether they are To, CC, BCC, or the Sender. Normally, we use the partyid field to point to a Dataverse record like a Contact, Lead, User, or Queue.

Every participant in an email is stored as a row in the Activity Party table.

Key fields include:

partyid → Reference to the actual record (Contact, Account, User, Queue, etc.)

participationtypemask → Role (1 = Sender, 2 = To, 3 = CC, 4 = BCC)

addressused → The raw email address used

Normally, if a Contact or User is referenced in partyid, Dataverse automatically pulls their primary email.

But there are situations where this is not enough. That’s where addressused becomes important.

Multiple Email Addresses on a Record – A Contact, Lead, or User might have more than one email (work, personal, secondary). By default, Dataverse always uses the primary email field. But if we need to send an email to a specific alternate address, we can set it directly in addressused.

Unresolved Recipients – There are times when we need to send an email to someone who doesn’t exist in Dataverse at all—for example, an external consultant, new partner, or temporary vendor.

Recenlty we had to send email to particular email address not stored as actual record in CRM, below is how we specified the email address in the Add a new Row (Email) action of Power Automate.

"to": [
  { "partyid@odata.bind": "/contacts(11111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555)" },
  { "addressused": "external.partner@example.com" }
],
"cc": [
  { "addressused": "manager@example.com" }
]

Advertisements

Update Business Process Flow Stage using Excel Import with Power Automate – Dataverse / Dynamics 365

In some business scenarios, we might need to update the Business Process Flow (BPF) stage of a record during an Excel import — especially during data migration or bulk record manipulation. In this blog post, we’ll walk through how to set a desired BPF stage (based on the stage name) and automatically move the record to that stage using Power Automate.

We’re working with a custom Dataverse table called Test(cr1a7_test) and a Business Process Flow named My Business Process Flow, which includes the following stages:

“select processidname,stagename, processstageid from processstage where processid = [processGUID]”

Our goal is to allow users to specify the stage name (e.g., “Stage 2”) through Excel import, and have a Power Automate flow update the record’s BPF instance to the corresponding stage automatically.

For this –

We’ll add a field called the Desired BPF Stage choice field on our table to store the desired stage name.
We’ll create a Power Automate flow that triggers on create or update.
We’ll maintain a static JSON mapping of stage names to stage IDs and their traversed paths.
We’ll look up the corresponding stage ID and traversed path from the JSON.
We’ll fetch the BPF instance for the record.
We’ll update the BPF instance with the new active stage and traversed path.

Below is how we can define our JSON structure for mapping, which we will store either in a variable inside Power Automate or save as an environment variable.

A computer code on a white background

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Trigger – When a row is added or modified.

Initialize Variable with JSON mapping

Parse JSON – using the sample data

Use a “Filter array” action to find the object where stageName matches custom_desiredbpfstage.

Initialize variables to store the Stage ID and traversed path.

first(body(‘Filter_array’))?[‘stageId’]
first(body(‘Filter_array’))?[‘traversedPath’]

Use List Rows to check if BPF Instance exists or not, if not we will create it or update it.

length(outputs(‘List_rows’)?[‘body/value’]) > 0

Update or Create a new BPF instance associated with the record.

Below we can see the user specifying the Stage 3 value for the Desired BPF Stage column in the Excel to be imported.

We can see the Excel imported successfully.

Below we can see our flow running successfully.

And the record in Stage 3 of the BPF.

Hope it helps..

Advertisements

Cloud Flows are disabled or turned off after copying a Dataverse Environment ? (Power Automate / Power Platform)

Recently we copied our UAT environment to one of the testing environments. After copying, we saw that all the cloud flows were in Off / Disabled state.

A screenshot of a computer

Description automatically generated

This was because during copy the environment is set in administration mode and background operations are also disabled.

Flows are automatically turned off to prevent –

Accidental execution of automation in a copied/test environment
Potential integration issues due to different connectors or authentication.
Unintended data modifications (e.g., flows interacting with external systems like SharePoint, SQL, or APIs).

If required, we can disable the administration mode or at least enable the background operations.

However, the flows will not automatically switch On even if we enable either the Administration Mode or Background operations.

Here we need to switch them On manually or use PowerShell scripts or API to do so.

Refer to blog posts for details on it –

PowerShell – https://www.syskit.com/blog/managing-microsoft-powerapps-and-flow-like-a-pro-part-3-managing-flows/

Console App / API – https://nishantrana.me/2024/06/12/enable-disable-turn-on-turn-off-multiple-cloud-flows-using-code-power-automate/

Additional Considerations –

Connection References: If the flows use connection references (like SharePoint, Dataverse, Outlook, etc.), we need to verify them in Solution > Connection References and update them if necessary.

Environment Variables: If the flows depend on environment variables (e.g., API URLs, credentials), we need to update them the new environment.

Reassign Flow Owners: If the original owner of a flow is missing from the copied environment, we need to assign a new owner.

Lastly, if flows are not behaving correctly, check the callback registration records

https://nishantrana.me/2024/06/11/fixed-flow-not-getting-triggered-callback-registration-power-automate-dataverse/

Get more details around copying the environment.

Hope it helps..

Advertisements