Moving a Power Automate Flow from My Flows into a CDS Solution

As many are aware, Flows can now be included in a CDS Solution. There are many benefits of this, including the use of the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector and Run History being retained longer than 30 days. If you were not aware, flows that exist outside of a solution only retain their Run History for 30 days. These limits are covered HERE

There are many people, including myself, that have created Flows outside of a solution for one reason or another. But what happens when you want to start following the best practice to manage these within a solution and how do you bring it into a solution? Let's take a look.

Below, I have a simple test Flow that sends an email to a User and Contact record. This Flow was built without a solution and is accessible within My Flows.

However, I have decided that it would be better to manage and have this Flow included in a solution instead. I created a solution in my CDS environment where I want to add the Flow.

Open the solution, click Add Existing and select Flow

This will open a window that will allow you to choose Flows from another solution or from outside of a solution. In this case, we will choose Outside Solutions. Note the notification at the top and be sure to review those limitations.

Select your Flow and click Add

You will see the following

Now, we can see that this Flow exists in the solution and is no longer accessible in the My Flows area.

This does not change any of the connectors you are using when you do this. For example, if you are using the standard Common Data Service connector, it will not change to the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector. You will not be able to select the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector within this flow. To do that, you would need to recreate the flow. Changes such as that would need to be done manually. Open the Flow within the solution to make sure everything still looks good, is enabled if necessary, and that’s it!

Thanks for reading!

Aaron Richards