5 Features To Save You Time In Power Automate

if you're watching this video then you're probably using power automate and if you're using power automate it's a pretty good chance that you're doing it because you're trying to save time so you've identified some sort of business process or something in your own work life that you could make better if it was just handled for you just repeated and you didn't have to touch it or look at it so you really care about saving time right well these five tips in this video are going to help you save time in power automate [Music] okay the first thing I'm going to share with you today is how to use metadata columns in your flow run history so anytime you're looking at one of your flows maybe you're trying to like diagnose what happened trying to figure out you know what happened with the particular flow run there's a new feature relatively new it's new in the last few months where you can actually add columns to your flow history your run histories you can simply come here and add columns now in this particular case I'm running this flow from a SharePoint list that has metadata in it so all of these fields are essentially coming from that SharePoint list if you have other scenarios where maybe you're manually calling a flow or there are some other data elements that are feeding into that flow those items will show up here as well but in this particular case I'm going to choose things like my priority maybe the title and the department because those are things I'm interested in and you can simply save that and now you have some additional data that you can actually work with that will help you sort out what's actually going on so there I see the titles of my items I actually have a department field that I can review let me actually clean some of this up so we can see that department a little bit better I'm going to go dump the priority and the title and then we can make a little bit better sense out of it so in this particular case the department field is the choice field on my SharePoint list so let me go ahead and expand my department field a little bit and in this case the department field is a choice column and so this is a little bit messy to deal with but you see you've got your ID for that choice and then you've also got your textual value there so these are indicating that these were submitted with human resources marketing accounting human resources for example so this can be used as kind of a quick way to find a particular flow run that you're interested in so if one of those metadata columns for example was the ID for example of a SharePoint list item you could add that to this set of columns to quickly find the flow run that you're trying to troubleshoot so if something went wrong with the particular item in SharePoint and you want to know why you can quickly find that flow run rather than selecting from all of the different flow runs and opening up the actual run of them to review you what happened the other thing that I'll note here is once you actually save this once you make this change once you flip over to the all runs view of your run history that becomes a sticky thing right so this is actually a nicer way so that I can actually see all of the data that's in that particular Department value and then again you can add columns here as well and they stick with that view so the next time I come back and I'm trying to troubleshoot this particular view those changes that I've made to those columns will be there for me and that is user specific so if somebody comes somebody else comes along and is troubleshooting the same flow for example they're going to have to add those columns themselves so it's kind of it can be tailored but they're sticky per user and the reason that this is important and useful is because in a scenario where you have hundreds maybe thousands of flow runs that you need to actually parse through you need a quick way to find the particular flow run that actually you know did something wrong so that you can diagnose it and having these columns available to you is a good way to get there I will say it's not a hundred percent complete some of the things that are missing Microsoft if you're listening it would be really awesome if I could filter by these columns can't do that yet so in the scenario where you have thousands of of runs you will find yourself adding these columns and then clicking show more show more show more not that great but it is better than it was all right now I'm going to follow that last one up with a related tip and that is the ability to actually batch resubmit your flows so in the scenario where you have a number of failed flows for example you now have the ability to select multiple flows and you can actually resubmit all of those flow runs so think of a scenario like I have here where I have a couple failed runs if I take a quick look at these runs and actually I'll expand this department field again if you take a look at those last two failures you'll notice that they have something in common and that is they both ran with human resources as the department so the important thing to note about that is in addition to identifying specific flow runs you can actually use some of this metadata to identify common problems with with your flow runs in this particular scenario this is indicating to me that maybe Human Resources is a problem department for my flow so in this particular scenario I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go look at my flow we're going to edit the flow and diagnose that issue all right so I'm going to dive right into this flow I kind of know what the problem is already and I have this big condition here this is completely contrived scenario where I'm checking for whether or not the department is a specific thing so in the scenario somebody came along and modified that list added another department to that choice column that I didn't account for in my flow we would need to update the flow so I'm going to go ahead and do that here and I'm going to say if the department equal to human resources all right so now that should qualify and it will no longer terminate an error over here and instead we'll actually do the rest of the thing which is an approval and send an email and all that good stuff so I'm going to save this flow all right so now I've made that change I've fixed it the beautiful thing is I can jump back out and look at my run history so this particular case will go back to the all runs identify those two for sure that we're human resources that ran just today I'm going to identify both of those I'm going to select both of them and then I'm going to resubmit both flow runs at the same time so this is going to save you a lot of time if you have a scenario like this where you've got you know maybe something changed and all of a sudden you know if the flow is running a bunch of times because of a lot of different transactions triggered it and the last thing you want to do is resubmit every single one of those so if you're confident that you solved the problem with the flow for that particular Human Resources scenario for example you can grab all of those things and just resubmit them all all right so I just resubmitted those two and they actually failed again so I didn't fix it I think I was a little bit sloppy in what I chose here I realized that in these other scenarios we're actually looking at the department value and in this one I'm looking at the department which is the ID of that choice so we're going to dump this I'm just going to grab this so it's absolutely correct and so if that's equal to human resources that should now resolve that issue save that all right so now we're going to cross our fingers once again we're going to jump back out to our flow run history and now I'm actually going to grab all of these so we're going to flip over to our all runs and now I have four of them to resubmit that makes it even more fun right so we're going to go ahead and resubmit those and I expect it should work this time and so now if we refresh this we should see a different scenario and they're all basically running so in these particular scenarios one of the things that we're doing in the case that it does match a department is we're actually sending an approval so these are all pending approval right now so if I jump over really quick to my approvals which I should have a bunch of them over here those should show up here approve this please a whole bunch of them and so I'm just going to go through and approve a few of these quick all right and now that we've actually approved those should be able to jump back over here and again refresh our run history and some of them have now succeeded so that's just a quick way to basically identify all of those problem scenarios and then resubmit them all at once once again this is just another way to save you time in power automate if you've got a bunch of flow runs and you need to manage them in bulk because something went haywire maybe a maybe a connection string you know got reconfigured and was bad or maybe a service went down and so all of the flow runs failed and the service is now back up so you need to resubmit them this is a handy little tool for doing that all right the next thing we're going to jump into is kind of a preview feature so to speak so I'm going to jump back into editing this flow and there is a new expression editor available to you in power automate and this is a really nice tool it's very handy it makes things a bit quicker when you're actually editing or modifying or creating a flow and in order to use this you actually need to turn on those preview features or those experimental features and the way that you do that is up here in your settings and power automate you go to your all power automate settings and you turn this little experimental features thing on before I do that I want to kind of walk through with you what it used to look like and then we can talk about how it is different so in this particular case I'm just going to jump into this initialized variable that I have here and we'll jump right into the expression editor so you can see what it looks like and so if you're familiar with power automate you understand Dynamic content and you have the ability to search here and find something you're looking for that's available to you in your flow but then you also have this expression editor which is kind of nice there's a little bit of intellisense here and there's some options down below gives you a bunch of different string functions and you know math functions and iterators and things like that that are available to you but let's say you wanted to upper case something you're going to use a two upper and then you want to put something else in here to actually do that you have to know that you kind of got to flip over to this Dynamic content window and then you can actually select from something in here or you actually have to know the Syntax for entering that variable or whatever that element is it's kind of a pain the other thing that happens here in the old expression editor that is unfortunate is if your expression gets to be really long you've got a lot of stuff going on it becomes really kind of untenable unmanageable very difficult and more often than not you'll find yourself copy pasting that into notepad and working with it there which has no intellisense and it just makes everything a bit slow so without further Ado let's switch over to the new experimental feature now when you do this note that it's going to basically refresh your view of that flow that you're editing and so if you've made any changes in the middle of doing this you'll want to make sure those are saved before you do that so we're going to jump over and grab our settings and we're going to turn on that feature I'm going to save it and now every time you log in and you're using power automate to create a flow you're going to have those experimental features available to you and one day this won't be experimental it'll just be there and be better but we're going to go ahead and open that same initialized variable action again and now you'll notice that this expression editor is very different we still have our Dynamic values we have our expression we can search for our Dynamic values but the big difference here is when I flip over to this expression editor first thing you'll notice is it's a big text editor window like it's multi-line I can put a bunch of stuff in here you get the same intellisense that you got before and then the other really nice thing about this is when I'm ready to add Dynamic content uh into my expression instead of flipping up here so don't get confused and do that you flip it down here and now you can actually search for those values so if I'm looking for department for example I can actually find that down here and stick it right into my expression and it's all done for me so this will save you a lot of time I encourage you to turn that experimental features on just to use this this new expression editor experience it's way better it'll be way less confusing and frustrating for you in the end okay the fourth tip I want to show you today on how to save time in power automate is copy paste so you may or may not know that this is available to you but the reality is there are a lot of things that we do in power automate that we end up repeating so maybe it's uh send an email action or send a request to SharePoint those things are often uh they can be cumbersome to configure so if you have email templates for example and you have a lot of body content that's very similar sometimes you'll want to copy that or in the case of the HTTP request to SharePoint that one's a very common one where I do this all the time because you may have Json that you're passing in to set a specific item metadata value a certain way if this then that type of scenario so and so then that action becomes very much similar in those cases and so if you're doing that you should be aware that you don't have to build those things from scratch every time you can use the copy paste function so you can simply grab any of the actions that you're using in your flow and you can copy them to your clipboard and then subsequently anywhere else in your flow you can paste them so you can add a new action and then instead of finding the send email action you can use your clipboard and then grab that one that you had added to your clipboard and so now I have a duplicate of this one that I had up here right so they're they basically are the same and so then you can make any tweaks that you need to make to the second one another really nice aspect of this feature is you can do that same copy paste into another flow so in the scenario where you have multiple Flows In Your solution uh you're doing a lot of different things but there's this one common thing that you do in all of them you don't have to rebuild that same action or even set of actions or group of actions in each flow you can actually copy that in one flow move over to another tab another window in the same environment to another flow and paste from your clipboard and it'll bring all that in now in that scenario when you do that you'll have to like reconnect a bunch of the data elements but it will still save you a whole lot of time particularly if you're copying you know entire sections of your flow things that are all within a condition or within a scope or something like that it's a nice way to be able to move all of that stuff over and not have to recreate it all from scratch [Music] okay our last tip today is don't get carried away with copy and paste that's a really nice thing like makes things convenient but the reality is if you find yourself uh using that too much you should ask yourself should I be doing something different so the thing that you should consider doing differently is if you have a scenario where you're basically duplicating the same functionality from one flow to another flow or maybe you have multiple branches within either a switch or a condition in your flow and you're basically doing the same thing in each one of those maybe it's the same thing and you're doing maybe you're passing a different value as you're creating a item in a list or a row and dataverse for example you're just it's like one value different but it's basically the same thing you should really look at that and ask yourself if you should be utilizing child flows so we have another blog post out there on child flows where Mitch actually walks through why they're the best flows so I encourage you to check that out I'm going to quick show you just a real quick and dirty example on how you might use a child flow instead of a copy paste so in the scenario here I have I'm sending an email I'm starting and waiting for an approval and then I'm basically doing something with that approval based on the outcome I'm sending this was approved or this was rejected for example in this particular scenario let's assume I've got other flows that are basically doing the same thing there they want to call an approval and send a response to the requester so in this particular scenario what I've done is I've taken this condition and this start and wait for approval and I've actually copied them and put them into another flow so let's take a quick look at that other flow so I'm going to go back over here and one thing to know is if you're going to use child flows they need to be in a solution I will tell you that you can have multiple Solutions in the same environment that all call flows across each other the key thing is that the flow that you're calling as a child flow needs to be within a solution so in this particular case I've got both of my flows in the same solution uh and this child flow I've kind of designated as such named it request approval and notify child flow so let's take a quick look at what this is doing all right so in any child flow generally speaking uh they're going to be manually triggered uh in this scenario I've defined a couple inputs so this is where if you're doing the same thing but maybe you're passing in different data to it this is that opportunity you would add inputs to your manual trigger for example and collect things like the approver email the requester email that's what I'm doing here also any child flow is going to at some point need to respond to the caller and so this is something you want to consider whether or not this child flow is doing something that takes a long time or whether or not it's like a quick hit and we're done in this scenario we're starting and waiting for an approval so that could be potentially days that I'm waiting for that approval so the thing you need to make sure that you do is you respond to the calling power app or flow and that's what this respond action is basically doing and I'm simply sending back a status here that says I started the process and then subsequent to that I'm starting and waiting for my approval I'm passing in that approver email that's given to me on the input and then subsequent to that uh depending on whether or not it's approved I actually send an email back to the requester saying hey your request was approved or your request was denied and so that's what the child flow does this is basically that same functionality I simply made it into what we would call dry code or a module and put it in its own child flow now once you have your child flow you can go back to your other flow and we can actually get rid of these things that we're doing here so I'm going to go ahead and delete my start and wait for approval and I'm going to completely get rid of this condition because we're now doing that in another flow and instead of doing those things we're going to call a child flow so here we're going to look for an action easiest thing to do is search for child flow and you have an option here for run a child flow and then this will get basically give you an option to select from all of the different flows that are in Solutions within your environment so notice I only had those two flows in my one solution but there are other flows that are showing up here that I could call as child flows those flows are also in other Solutions so in this particular case we are going to request approval and notify so there's the child full that we care about and once that initializes we'll have options to specify the approver email as well as the requester email so in this case I am the approver so we're going to Simply hard code my email address in there and in this case we want the requester basically as the person that submitted the item in SharePoint and we're initializing a requester variable here from the created by email address for that item so we're going to jump down in here and we're going to specify our requester option here so once we've configured that now I can basically I'm going to go ahead and rename this because that's just a good thing to do so now we've done that now we have that child flow that can be called from any other flow so if you've got another process that needs to request approval and send a notification and it's that simple there's a child flow out there in that solution other people can use it they can call it from their flows and that will save you a lot of time so think about those things in terms of like what are those things that we're repeating all the time and you know that are just common you know things that we do common parts of the process those are all eligible for child flows and certainly one of the big indicators or things that should make you question should I be using a child flow is if you're copy pasting a lot this is a principle we take away from Pro coding we call it dry code or don't repeat yourself and this is something that Mitch covers in his blog post I encourage you to go take a look at that all right so that does it for our five tips to save you time in power automate hopefully that will save you some time as your automating processes in your business if you've made it this far I want to say thank you for watching and if you like this content be sure to like And subscribe we'll see you next time

Channel: Bulb Digital

Views: 11,231

Keywords: Advanced power apps, Environment variables, Microsoft power automate, Power automate, Power platform microsoft, microsoft power apps, microsoft power platform, microsoft power platform overview, microsoft powerapps, microsoft powerapps tutorial, ms power apps, power apps, power apps tutorial, power automate, power automate tutorial, power platform, power platform fundamentals, power platform tutorial, powerapps, powerapps tutorial

Id: ftaVjixerHE

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023