Dataflows in a patch solution are deleted when merged with the main solution

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Posted on by khoait

43 Most Valuable Professional

Hi,

I have a number of dataflows in the main solution. I tried to deploy the solution as managed from Dev to UAT. It failed to import every time. I think it was because the dataflows took long to be published causing the import process to timeout/failed.

I tried to work around it by splitting each dataflow to patch solutions and deploy patch solutions one by one. Some needed reimport a few times, but I managed to import them all.

Then I wanted to merge the patches with the main solution, so I can have everything in one solution. Merging was successful, however I can't see the dataflows under My Dataflows section, I can still see them in the main solution but the edit option is disabled.

The dataflows are worth a whole sprint, I don't want to recreate them over again 😥 This is too bad if we want to have a proper ALM for dataflows.

Could anyone please advise?

Thanks

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Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

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khoait 43 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Re: Dataflows in a patch solution are deleted when merged with the main solution

Thanks for your response @cchannon !

I created the dataflows in Power Platform Maker Portal in a Dev environment, so no one else should own the dataflows. I also checked the Dataflow Table in Advanced Find and all dataflows records are own by myself.

The solution size is only 238KB just containing the dataflows. So definitely not because of the solution size. The import error log wans't very helpful. It said "A task was canceled".

I tried to split a single dataflow to a separate patch solution. And it imported successfully, so I did the same for the rest of the dataflows. The error happens when I have two or more dataflows in a solution.

That's what I did to deploy all dataflows to a target environment. Put it aside, the critical problem is when I merged the patches to the main solution. The dataflows are deleted/removed and aren't shown up in My Dataflows section. I checked Dataflow Table in advanced find and they're still there, and there is no way I can edit them.
cchannon 4,702 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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Re: Dataflows in a patch solution are deleted when merged with the main solution

OK, so there's a few things going on here. Let's work from the bottom up.

The most likely reason why the dataflows are not in your My Flows and are editable for you is that they are considered 'owned' by someone else. They aren't fully managed the same way as other customizations in the system; more like a hybrid of a customization and a record. Whoever 'owns' the Dataflow needs to share it with you or assign it to you for you to be able to edit it.

"But who owns it?!" You are probably asking yourself. The answer is (most likely) the person who imported the solution for you. Your ownership does not convey in the solution file itself because your user is not guaranteed to exist in the target environment, but the user performing the import does exist in target and they are set as the owner by default (this can overwritten by assigning away the dataflow as well as sharing).

Now why did you need to break up the solution? This is confusing to me too. I would be very surprised if it was actually caused by solution file size (it would have to be REALLY big) so I suggest that if it happens again, open your target environment and look at the Solution History. The import failure will have an error message you can download for more detail to learn what specifically failed.