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Can a Flow be used within different Solutions

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Hi All - I have 3 environments for Development, Staging and Production. In my Development environment i have an unmanaged solution where there is a flow. The same flow can be utilized in other solutions as well within that environment so i have added it in other solutions. Now my questions is

Is that flow which is present in different environments a different instance of that flow or the same flow? If i make edit to that flow in one solution will it reflect in the other solutions as well?

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Michael E. Gernaey 53,325 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @ST-24070323-0

You should be doing the following

1. Creating you Unmanaged in Dev

2. Exporting as a Managed Solution Test / UAT / Prod / Other

You should NOT ever make changes to the flow in other environments. You should make sure to use environment variables and configuration tables to store anything dynamic.

3. It is the same flow, not a separate one. You called it an instance. Its not the right term. It is exactly the same flow in all environments.

If you change it in one you will make installing the solution or exporting that solution have a completely different flow and that will cause you headaches.

4. If you are in the SAME environment and make a change to a flow that has been added to different solutions, then it will just be seen as the same flow, with the updated changes. You will need to make sure to export the other solutions using it, (in the same environment), so that it references the correct details of the flow.

going forward from the #4 it will still be the same flow, but updated/upgraded depending on how you want to see it.

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ST-24070323-0 113 on at

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@FLMike - Thank you for your reply. Let us talk about one environment first. Suppose in one environment i have 2 Solutions. There is a flow ABC which has a common functionality so i want to use it in both the solutions. Now since that flow is being used in 1 solution. When i add it to the second solution it uses the environment variables/connection references of the 1 solution. [Note: the environment variable and connection reference does not get added automatically in the 2nd solution].

1. Is it ok that the environment variable and connection reference not being present in the second solution?

2. If there is a slight modification i need to make in flow ABC for solution 2. And if i edit the flow in the second solution. Will that change reflect in the first solution as well?

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Michael E. Gernaey 53,325 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi

Yes I understood what you said, my response is (#4 was intended to say), you need to have everything in both solutions. Its only by pure luck it's working.

If someone uninstalled Solution 1, it would make solution 2 fail for many reasons.

What I normally do, is make sure to have a Shared Base Solution that has all the shared items. that way you do not keep adding them all over, just in one place that all reference :-)

From a ... luck perspective because they are all pointing at the same flow. Changing it in one will NOT right away reflect it in the other no, because the metadata hasn't been updated. But depending on the changes you make you may not be impacted.

But if you change for instance a field that the flow uses in Dataverse or Sharepoint, and you only fix it in 2, solution 1 wont see that. Hence why you should use a Base Solution for shared items, so that it will in fact show up properly once you redo the Solutions (1 and 2) and export and import them so they are references the right metadata of the shared solution.

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