Connection vs Connection Reference in Power Automate

You would have noticed towards the right side of the flow that

Sometimes its written “Connections” &

Sometimes its written “Connection References” .

So what’s the difference and which one to use ?

Well!

A connection is a way for users to connect their logged in accounts and use a set of pre-built actions and triggers to build their flows. This is when we create our flows under the “My Flows” tab i.e. when a flow is not in a solution it uses connections. If that flow is then added into solution, it will continue to use connections initially But we can change it to Connection Reference anytime. How? You will get to know after reading this Blog.

A connection reference in turn is a solution component that contains information about a connector. You can import your connection reference into a target environment with no further configuration needed after the import completes and this is the main USP of it. These are particularly useful when moving flows across environments, updating flow definitions, automating deployment pipelines for secure, and having a healthy Application Lifecycle Management.

Flows created in a solution are known as solution-aware flows. You can add multiple flows in a single solution. The biggest difference between Connection and Connection reference usage is capability of Solution-aware working. The flows which include “Connection” will be turned off after the deployment via solution and the connections needs to be re-established. But any flow which use only “Connection Reference” will not cause any problem after the deployment. No manual step is needed after deploying the solution.

Ensure that the Connection Reference is inside the same solution as the flow and for this create or add a Connection Reference in the same solution. When an action is added to a solution flow, Power Automate will try to reuse existing Connection References from the current solution or other solutions before creating a new Connection Reference.

It is however important to understand how flows and connections are associated with each other.

Every action in your flow is bound to a specific instance of a connection that it will use to “execute” that action. This is why today, while moving flows across environments – users are required to rebind every operation to a connection.

[Connections contain secrets, and therefore can’t be moved across environments]

Let’s visualize it, here each dotted line indicates a link that requires rebinding after importing or updating a flow via a solution.

When you move these two-flow across environments – all the links shown by dotted lines are severed and have to be re-established and switched on after performing an update or import.

Connection references provides an abstraction layer between flows and the connections they use. As mentioned, these are solution-aware components that contain a reference which associates the connector used and the flow it resides in. When importing a solution, that contains a flow, from one environment to the other, it prevents you from needing to open the flow and re-establish connections.

There are a lot of Benefits of Connection Reference and some of them are listed here:

• Updating the value of a connection reference will automatically update the flows using the connection reference as opposed to updating every operation.
• Connection references offer semantic value with editable display names and descriptions. Eg – A connection reference named “Service Account” can point to a connection named “svcaccount1@contoso.com”; this provides for improved discovery, selection and organization of connections.

Conclusion: Maintenance of unconsciously created flows will become more difficult as the number of flow increases. As a result, we need to know the exact difference between the two. If you are working with one of Dynamics 365 project and decide to use Cloud Flows, then keep all the Cloud Flows under one Solution with a Connection Reference as part of that solution pointing to only one Connection which is created with specific account only. (Make sure that all flows are run only with one user who is admin). Its easier to track it this way too as it will appear in the Audit History. Also as a good practice, remove Duplicate Connection and Connection References which is not necessary.

Next, we would learn How to convert a Connection to Connection reference?

Flows can be updated to use connections references instead of connections in one of two ways:

1. If the flow is exported in an unmanaged solution and imported, the connections will be removed and replaced with connection references.
2. When a solution flow is opened, the flow checker on the flow details page will show a warning to Use connection references. The warning message contains an action to Remove connections so connection references can be added. Clicking that action will remove connections from the trigger and actions in the flow and allow connection references to be selected and created.

Lastly, there is a Power Tip here: Recently you might be facing the issue where if you open the output of a certain action step, the screen starts flickering. If you are facing the same, just zoom out and zoom in few times, it will become stable.

Hope it helps!

& the Power Quote of the day is:

“A genius is a man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing their mind.”