Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hi,

I've been trying to build some business flows over the past couple of days but find that either I'm doing it totally wrong or business flows simply are incredibly poorly designed and useless in anything other than MS' dreamed up use cases.

My use case is very simple: A case table that auto generates a case number and contains some basic customer data and a work table that has a auto generated work order number and some basic information related to the work that has to be done. Multiple work orders can be assigned to a single case (e.g. replace aircon & paint front door).

So I was thinking great, I'll just make a flow that forces a user to fill out the required fields, generates the case and work numbers in the background and carry over some data that a user put into a previous step to a next step (to be able to relate cases and work orders).

It appears non of that is actually possible.

1) The first problem is the UI/UX. Why is a form shown when running a flow from a model app? So a user will see a form but instead of filling that out, you have to tell them they instead need to fill out the business flow forms on the same screen. This is needlessly confusing. A business flow should have its own screen showing only whatever you want to have filled out in the flow.
2) A business flow cannot actually save anything as far as I can tell. Users have to click the save button before a next step becomes available. Again this is just confusing for users because that save button is outside of the business flow part of the UI.

3) Doesn't look like you can carry over data inserted into one stage over to the next stage to auto populate some fields.
4) You cannot create loops. E.g. For my "work order" stage I want a conditional for the user to select whether they want to add another work order or not. This is not possible. Maybe you can use a very hacky solution such as simply creating a lot of branches with each new stage being essentially a copy of the original work order stage but then you run into limits with the number of branches and stages you can have.

5) Documentation is non existent. How are these few pages helpful in teaching me how to use business flows? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/business-process-flows-overview

I'm struggling to see why such basic functionality is not included. Sure, you can use business flows to send an email or something but why isn't it possible to use flows to fill out forms in a logical manner?

Am I doing it wrong or is this just another part of the power platform that is a case of having to accept major compromises to basic functionality in order to be able to get anything done because of core deficiencies in how this is designed to work?

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