Power Automate Dynamics 365 connector deprecation and the path forward

With the deprecation announcement of the Dynamics 365 connector, a common question is guidelines for interacting with Dynamics 365 Apps using Common Data Service Connectors. Why I say connectors is because there are two Common Data Service connectors. This post on our PFE team blog describes how to find these different connectors and differences in triggers and actions.

At high level, the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector should be the first choice, and if that doesn’t serve the requirement then use the Common Data Service connector as next option.

So why should the Current Environment connection be the first choice compared to other one? Here I talk about a series of advantages of the "Current Environment" connector:

• Auto activation of Flow on Solution import.  I discussed this in earlier post. If you package your Flow in a Solution and it’s using only the Current Environment connector for the trigger and all actions, the flow would be activated as part of solution import in target environment.

• Current Environment trigger allows "Run as" and filtered triggering on update of specific attribute. These can be compared with legacy workflows in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement or CDS.

• The Current Environment "List records" action provides flexibility to use ODATA query or FetchXML query. One has the flexibility to use link entity in FetchXML or Expand Query property to include related entity data. You may refer to this post on Dynamics community web site to learn how to use Expand query.

• Actions available with Current Environment connector are far more versatile CDS actions compared to basic CRUD actions in Common Data Service connector. You may refer to Work better with the Common Data Service in Power Automate post on Power Automate product blog site to learn more about Current Environment actions like Bound/Unbound, Relate/Unrelate and “Executes a changeset request” to run multiple actions at once.

Writing Filter or Expand Query formulas can be eased out using the FetchXML Builder plugin of the XrmToolBox community tool. The View drop down has the option to generate Power Automate parameters based on current FetchXML you create:

The "When a record is selected trigger" trigger is not available with Current Environment connector, it's available with Common Data Service connector.  This is the only trigger requirement one can think of using Common Data Service connector.

The Ideas page on Power Automate Community website is a good tool to find and vote on existing ideas or submit your own suggestions/ideas.

Hope this helps!

Bhavesh Shastri