Microsoft Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) Workflow Automation
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Compose holds a value for the rest of the flow: a number, some text, or a whole JSON document. Later actions use it as Outputs. It's the simplest way to keep a flow's settings in one place, and this guide uses it for exactly that.
You don't need to leave the designer to try a flow. Test runs it there, asks for any inputs, and shows each step's result on the canvas with how long it took. This guide tests an instant flow and reads what came back.
An instant flow can ask for a value every time someone starts it: a site address, a date, a name. You add the question to the Manually trigger a flow trigger as an input, and the rest of the flow uses the answer. This guide adds a text input and gives it a name and a description people understand.
A flow that has to move to another environment with its app belongs inside a solution. This guide creates an instant cloud flow, one that someone starts by hand, inside a solution, and then opens it in the new designer, which takes one extra step.
An object can belong to more than one solution, and sometimes it ends up in one it shouldn't. Remove from this solution takes it out of that solution and leaves the object itself, and every other solution it's in, alone. The command next to it deletes the object everywhere, so it's worth knowing which is which.
A flow in a solution doesn't connect to SharePoint directly. Each action points to a connection reference, and the connection reference points to a connection. When the solution is imported somewhere else, whoever imports it picks a connection for each reference, and the flow works there. This guide creates one inside a solution, before the flow that uses it.
I ran my setup flow a second time to prove it was safe to run again. Instead of finishing in seconds, it sat on Waiting for half an hour, then failed: Action 'Remove_Title_from_the_view' failed: BadGateway. Behind the 502 was SharePoint saying Invalid field name. The first run had already removed that column from the view, and asking again was an error that Power Automate retried for minutes at a time.
My flow failed with Invalid JSON. A token was not recognized in the JSON content. The JSON it sent looked fine in the designer. In the run, a false from my data had become False, with a capital F, which isn't JSON. An if() expression fixed it.
Power Automate's expression editor told me This expression has a problem. You can fix it manually or with Copilot. The expression was correct, and the same one worked elsewhere in the flow. Selecting Add again, sometimes two or three times, added it. Once, though, the message was right, and the reason is worth knowing.
I saved a cloud flow, and the action I had open in Power Automate's new designer suddenly showed No additional information is needed for this step, Not connected. and an empty Code view. It looked as if Save had wiped the action. It hadn't: selecting the action again brought everything back.
