One of the huge benefits of the Power Platform is the foundation onto Azure. With Azure Devops, there is a “seamless” integration to source control systems like TFS and Git. (Well, not that seamless obviously, that’s what this post is about). Especially triggering a build can be a nice addition, like end of day, you want to save your precious work.

To achieve this, I rely on the Center of Excellence core components solution, which will identify the environments and their respective solutions. Displaying them in a gallery let me easily choose which build I wanted to trigger.

I tested two options to achieve a build trigger, one with the canvas app integration, and one with the power automate connector. Both of them work in the same way, have the same parameters, etc.. But if you go with a power automate, you can define the run-only users and let people queue a build who don’t have access to it (normally – be careful which builds!)

Defined some parameters on the build definition to be able to launch the build on a particular solution (you need to know your solution, right? ) didn’t work in my case. I’ve spent some time figuring out why this didn’t work, and actually, those are template parameters. I’ve continued on working with variables now on the pipelines, and worked like a charm. Here you can find my final working example providing the build parameter definition id (retrieve it by using list pipelines, it’s an integer value) and the source branch (from where you want to launch the pipeline)

The clue in my scenario lies within not defining the variables into the yaml definition (this results in always having the default value used), but defining the variables in the variable pane on the pipeline: