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Modern Solution Explorer: Moving from Processes to Flow

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Posted on by Kit Englund

A few weeks ago, like the lone evangelist on the street corner, the sign was held up for all to see: The End is Nigh... for Dynamics Workflow Processes. Then last weekend came and went and when I opened my Solution in the early hours of Tuesday morning, I was greeted with the Modern Solution Explorer and Flow staring at me, as if challenging me to take it on and leave workflows far behind.

My first task was simple! All I need to do is concatenate two fields into one for easier representation on charts and reports. In this case, I wanted to concatenate "Territory"-"Program" (the latter being an Option Set of Projects our teams work on).

Two hours later all I had managed was a field containing a concatenation of the two GUIDs

I gave up and went back to my classic view and knocked a Workflow out in 2 minutes:

Simple!

But I know I must move on... please help me. This is where I am at so far:

And here is my poor attempt at a concatenation, which results in an output such as "58c59b0c-bbea-c822-a669-003edae14b53-2933002"

As you can clearly see, Flow is new to me. Given I'm trying to concatenate an entity name (Territory) with an Option Set, I know I need to get the label value for the Option Set and somehow get the entity record value for the Entity. I just can't figure out how to do this. I'm sure the answer is a nice easy one for someone who is deep in the Flow.

And as a last little vestige of hope - I hope that not all the simple pleasures that we take for granted in Workflow have been made just as easy in Flow... Any links to blogs that explain how to transition would be most welcome!

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Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Modern Solution Explorer: Moving from Processes to Flow

Hi Kit Englund

I'm sure your 5 hours won't go for nothing. Flow is not "easier" than the workflow engine we are used to but more capable which means we will need to spend some good time learning it.

Now, I confirmed that when I use the CDS trigger, I get your results, when I use the Dynamics connector it works, which drove me crazy the fact that you couldn't do it.

After some digging, in turned out that there are more than one trigger with the same name and by coincidence I choose the correct one. Look at the little help next to my trigger, it just answers our question.

And yes, we need to keep digging into this more and more but I think it will get easier overtime and when the triggers stabilize , hopefully we won't see many of these confusing ones
Kit Englund 45 on at

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RE: Modern Solution Explorer: Moving from Processes to Flow

Thanks Omar for your very detailed answer. Firstly, I don't have the Label that you have. I am using CDS components rather than in your example where you used Dynamics. I wonder if that could give us the difference? So I have gone through and checked other Option Sets and they are all presenting as "Option Value" (e.g. "Program Value").

But I can't just come back and ask that of someone kind enough to help me, so I tested the theory myself. I quickly ran up the same scenario using Dynamics rather than CDS... and "no deal". It is only presenting "Program" instead of "Program Label". I even searched by Label but none of my Option Sets show a Label option.

I am assuming that I don't have the option of a "Label" because I'm trying to concatenate this into a free text field. Therefore, I'm going to have to figure out how to get to the first step of your example.

I'm really doing my best to remain calm as my simple one-step Workflow is now becoming a 5 hour masterpiece. I am indeed perplexed with Microsoft today... this doesn't feel like the efficient future I thought was in front of me. I'll trust that this is merely a molehill on the path to a lot more functionality in Flow to support the replacement of Dynamics Workflows.

*Sigh*
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Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Modern Solution Explorer: Moving from Processes to Flow

Hi Kit, I like how you write your post :)

For Option set, you should see two fields in flow, one of them has "Label" appended with it. As an example, I created an optionset called Program and this is what Flow shows me when I try to add the label of the option set. Use the one with Label and you should get what you want.

For Territory, which I assume it is a lookup to an entity. You may need to issue a get record action (you already have the id of that territory. Below is a sample of how I did it. I like to use variables to store things that may be reused. I first started with On Create trigger on the top (you may change it to Create Or Update trigger). Then I read the program label directly as I explained above.

After that, to get the territory name, I issue another get record request asking for that territory record and providing the territory id, finally I save the name of the returned territory in another variable. Now if you concatenate these two variables, you will get what you want.

The result of my test is something like this which confirms that I'm getting the names and not the ID's. Of course i have dummy values for Program and territory.