Recently Microsoft released the preferred solution feature in Power Apps and Power Automate. But how does the Preferred solution configuration work?
Solutions
Table of Contents
Before we look at preferred solution it is important to understand what solutions are. Where in the past you might have gone to Apps, Flows or Tables in the Power apps or Power Automate navigation, at some point someone will may have told you to go to Solutions instead. In the solutions area of the Power Platform you can create solution packages that can contain all elements of your solution.
Typically you might have added a number of apps, flows, tables to your solution, but there are so many more parts of your solution that can be added to a solution package in Dataverse.
One of the huge benefits of solution packages are of course that you can deploy all flows and apps with a single export/import from a development to test or production environment.
The default solution
Before I’m looking at the preferred solution it is important to understand how the default solution works.
Everything that is added to your setup (even if you don’t use a solution package!), will be added to the default solution. So when you go to Tables, and create your custom table, this will be added to the default solution.
Within the default solution you will notice that you can’t export the solution.
Unlike Unmanaged and Managed solutions where you can do a lot more.
So the three solutions types that we have very different set of things we can do with them.
One of the important parts about the default solution is that the default publisher is being used. A publisher specifies where the solution came from and for every new element you add to a solution a prefix is set as specified with the publisher details.
So typically a prefix would be a small number of letters (in the example below my initials).
Whereas when a table is created outside a solution will receive this useless cr259 code as a prefix.
Now, it may not matter too much, what those internal names are. They look a bit ugly. But that may just be it. Imagine if you create a solution with a number of tables, flows, and apps and then by accident you add another table directly to Dataverse using the Tables option in the left hand side menu. Then all elements have prefixes matching your publisher and that one table has a different prefix.
Whenever you reference that one table you will regret it not having the right prefix. And once it is set you can’t change it
Preferred solution
To Set your preferred solution you can go to the settings in either Power Apps or Power Automate, or
Or within the Solutions are you can Manage your preferred solution.
Once you have set your preferred solution all tables, flows, apps or anything else you may want to create will be added to this preferred solution. This means that you can’t accidentally use that default publisher’s prefix anymore. Finally the left hand navigation is useable again.
But, ….
There is always a but.
If you work on multiple project, make sure that you switch over your preferred solution other wise you may mix up things.
Important note
The preferred solution setting is only related to the account that is logged in. So if you share an environment with other user then you setting the preferred solution doesn’t mean that it is also set for other users. Each user will need to look after their own preferred solution setting.