Continuing with my posts about the basics of PowerApps I’m now looking at using multiple environments. Quite often with Office 365 based solution I would consider creating multiple tenants, however with PowerApps and Flow I have not found a reason to do so yet.
Within the Admin Center there is an area specific for PowerApps and Flow.
This is where an unlimited number of environments can be created. Each environment has its own:
- PowerApps
- Flows
- Common Data Service
- Entities
- Picklists
- Gateways
- Connections
This is a great improvement as all you need to do is select an environment within the Office 365 suite bar.
Moving elements between environments
For each of the elements it is possible to your custom development between the environment.
PowerApps
To move PowerApps between environments open the app in Studio in for example your development environment then and save it locally on your PC.
Then change environment to the test environment and open the App. Once you have accepted connections to your data sources you can save the app to the new environment.
Flow
For Flows the process is different and there doesn’t seem to be an easy export and import option The Save As option available creates a copy within the tenant and the Submit as template seems to submit the flow as a general template that is shared betwe
en tenants and making the solution publicly available. So how can we move a Flow? Well, the option has been hidden a bit.
Then 3rd potential place is the Flow Admin Center.
Within the Flow Admin center click on environments and then click on the environment where your flow already exists.
Click on Resources and Flows are listed and export and import options are available…
It looks like this might still be under development as the export returns an almost empty .pkg file and import doesn’t create a new flow in my new environment. So so far there isn’t a way to get a Flow moved between environments. Unless I have missed something.
Common data Services
The common data services are a data store that looks a bit like Dynamics CRM database. It would not surprise me if the general idea is that this database will turn into the next version of CRM Dynamics.
It’s an Entity based data store unique to each environment. The import and export options are easy to find. Also the Clear all data option ( be very careful!!!) is very easy to use. When a new database is created a lot of example data is added. It will be wise to clear out the data before using the Common Data Service as clearing out data once you have added some of your own data could be a pain.
Other posts in this series