Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Changes to RunMode requirements

Hello,

Hoping to get some help with connection issues from cloud flow to desktop flow.

We have a Development Machine in Development Environment that we only connect to as "Attended" and does not have any licences for "Unattended".

We have production machines that run in Production Environment that we have "Unattended" licences for.

We determine whether to run the desktop flows as Unattended or Attended via an environment variable.

This has been working fine the past 18 months, however the past week all of our flows are unable to be saved due to the flows complaining about a lack of Unattended licences in Development.

The error goes away if we statically change the desktop flow run mode to "Attended" however this is not a viable solution as it is needed to be Unattended in prod (which is managed).

Has there been any changes or any workarounds that others have used to get past this issue?

Categories:

Business Process Flows

I don't have perticular solution or trick but below is my recommandation.

What you can do (steps)

Here are actionable resolutions:

Audit the licence status in Dev environment
- Verify that the Dev environment has a Process licence or unattended RPA add-on assigned.
- In the Power Platform Admin Centre → Environments → Choose Dev → Resources → Capacity/Add-ons: check for “Unattended RPA” capacity.
- Confirm that the machine (Dev machine) is registered under that environment and associated machine group (if used).
Ensure the flow’s run mode logic covers environment
- If your environment variable toggles run mode, but Dev cannot ever be Unattended due to licensing, you might adjust logic so Dev always uses Attended.
- Example: If Env = “Dev” then force run mode = “Attended”; if Env = “Prod” then Unattended.
- That will avoid the save error since the flow won’t attempt Unattended in Dev.
Allocate an unattended licence to the Dev environment (if desired)
- If you want Dev to mimic Prod and test Unattended behaviour, purchase or allocate an unattended RPA license for Dev environment.
- After allocation, verify machine settings: Machine/Group → Settings → “Reuse sessions for unattended runs” if needed.
Machine configuration checks
- The target machine for unattended runs must have no interactive user session (or must be able to be locked/logged-out) to allow unattended runs.
- Ensure your Dev machine meets that requirement if you convert to Unattended.
Versioning / ALM considerations
- Since you only changed licensing in Prod previously and Dev was attended-only, the recent error may reflect a licensing policy change by Microsoft (e.g., tightened enforcement).
- Keep your ALM workflow clear: Dev flows should probably run in attended mode; Prod flows in unattended.