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Deactivated flows and no connection after deployment through CICD

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Posted on by 481

Hi all, 

 

Here's the situation, we have Dev, Test and Prod environments. The developer is currently the owner of the flows in Dev and another user is the owner of the flows in Test and Prod. We use a DevOps pipeline to deploy between the different environments. It's a third person who carries out the deployment. What we are seeing is that everytime a flow is modified in the dev environment, when it is deployed to test it becomes deactivated and the connection has to be reset. This means that the person in test has to modify the flow to activate it and re-establish the connection which in turn creates an unmanaged layer on the flow which has to be deleted in order for the modifications to show up. Basically a whole lot of manual steps that we would love to avoid. 

 

I have seen that connection references can now be set during deployment using a settings file: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/alm/conn-ref-env-variables-build-tools We have tried this and it doesn't seem to be doing anything, our flows are still deactivated and no connections are set. The connection references say they have been modified, but no change to the flows themselves. Any tips on how to get this to work?

 

I have seen a lot of people having issues like this but no clear answers to why or how to solve it. I imagine it is to do with the multiple users involved across our environments. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem possible (correct me if I'm wrong) to use a service principal as owner of our flows as we will quickly reach API call limits. 

 

Any ideas of what we need to do to get the flows to stay active and for the connection to be set during deployment? I'm grateful for any insight. 

  • cjbarnaby Profile Picture
    cjbarnaby 44 on at
    Re: Deactivated flows and no connection after deployment through CICD

    Hi @HFG - that document you linked to relates to deployment settings files in MSFT's ALM Accelerator; I don't believe that applies to deployment settings files outside of that context. 

    We ended up creating a PowerShell script task in our release pipeline which does the kind of thing set out by @ScottDurow in this blog article. This worked fine for us, but strangely, as of about 3 weeks ago, the script doesn't actually appear to be required; it seems that flows are being enabled after deployment automatically (not totally 'automatically' - we do have a deployment settings file for each downstream environment that includes all the connection references and their matching connections in the target environment).

     

    I have no idea why I haven't seen anyone else mention this, since this was (is?) a pretty widely recognized impediment to ALM on the Power Platform; even MSFT's own ALM Accelerator (still) has a PowerShell script that runs during the deployment process to enable the Flows in the solution.

  • HFG Profile Picture
    HFG 481 on at
    Re: Deactivated flows and no connection after deployment through CICD

    Hi @rgupta 

    Sorry for such a slow reply!

    We never did manage to get this working. We're still having to do the manual steps everytime we deploy. What about you?

    I don't know if you've seen, but there have been advances in the deployment settings file which now includes activating flows. It's currently in preview, but I'm hoping for GA soon :  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/guidance/coe/setup-almacceleratorpowerplatform-deployment-config#creating-a-custom-deployment-settings-json-file

  • rgupta Profile Picture
    rgupta 11 on at
    Re: Deactivated flows and no connection after deployment through CICD

    Hello, @HFG Have you had any luck using the deployment file since? The deployment file doesn't seem to be making any difference at all. If we download the solution at Destination after import, it seems to have exactly the same json file as the source. What should have happened is that the Settings file in Azure Repo should have been used. But this doesn't seem to be the case.

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