Hi all,

It took me some time to get back at you all with some of the awesomeness of the Power Platform, but it’s worth the wait. I’m going to talk about the newly improved import experience of solutions.

Let’s talk about solutions first. What’s a solution? Let’s imagine following scenario. You are working on a development environment and want to ship your functionality and work to other instances. As like with moving in real life, you want to do it in the most efficient way possible. That’s why you don’t want to move piece by piece, but consolidate the functionalities by something, e.g. functionality, requirements, etc… There is where a solution comes into play. You can think of it as a box installed in your environment. When installed, the components which are in it, are accessible in that environment. That’s why for example, if you create a flow from a solution, you have access to the CDS (current environment) connector. It’s aware of the environment thanks to the solution.

You have two types of solutions. Managed and unmanaged. To not lead my post to far off topic, I will very shortly summarize that unmanaged solutions are used for development purposes as components in it are freely editable, whereas managed is used for testing and production environments since components are locked. You got the hang on right now of solutions, let’s talk about the new feature.

With the new experience, you are now able to add and edit connections to components of your solution. Back in the days, if you had a flow in your solution, to make it work after an import, you needed to open the flow and add or validate every connection used inside of it. This could protentionally lead to a big overhead task when deploying. It also required a manual action, so to integrate this in your ALM process, it was quite hard to achieve.

With the new experience however, you can, as with importing the canvas app, define which connections to use for the connections in your flows. This is a real game changer and will save you lots of frustrations and work! If you don’t currently have a connection for a data source contained in your solution, don’t worry. The new experience got you covered. It’s easy to create it from the pane presented.

Do you also like the Power Platform and how Microsoft makes your life easier? Let me know what you like the most!