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Flows from the field: Time zone conversion; Customer field; Quick Create form; Exchange rate conversion; Forms Pro

by Eamon McCarthy Earls
Assistant Editor, MSDynamicsWorld.com

Microsoft Dynamics 365 professionals put Power Automate to work converting between time zones, updating customer fields, setting up a Quick Create form, doing exchange rate conversions or logging Forms Pro feedback.

Want to see your flow featured in a future edition of this series? Contact me with your example.

Carrying out time zone conversions

Many users are already familiar with the convert time zones action in Power Automate. But Ryan Maclean pointed out an obvious limitation: It takes many Power Automate actions to do multiple time zone conversions. Given that Microsoft supports 250 different time zones, he recommends using an array drawing on data from the Windows Default Time Zones page, converting the current UTC time to produce different outputs.

With a trigger set, users can initialize the ConvertedTimes string variable to collect outputs and setup an array variable that names the time zones that need to be converted. A parse JSON step helps to access item values in combo with an apply to each loop and last of all a compose step.

Making sense of the customer-field

Benedikt Bergman shed some light on the customer field case entity. During a recent project, he faced the challenge of creating an automated way to set the name for new case entities. To populate the case name by combining the customer name, date, time, and case subject, he turned to a Power Automate flow. Leveraging an on create trigger, he ran into an issue finding the customer ID property.

Bergman went ahead and added a split, basing it off the entity type in the customer field and then filtered, helping to resolve the issue. He wrote:

I would like to point out the step that generates the time. It is a “convert time zone” action, which converts the time from UTC to UTC+1. The reason for that is that I am located in Stockholm and the servers are located in Ireland (as far as I know). You could also generate it with an expression in an compose action. But in this case it will not convert the time zone like I need it.

Replicating Quick Create forms

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About Eamon McCarthy Earls

As the assistant editor at MSDynamicsWorld.com, Eamon helps to oversee editorial content on the site and supports site management and strategy. He can be reached at eearls@msdynamicsworld.com.

Before joining MSDynamicsWorld.com, Eamon was editor for SearchNetworking.com at TechTarget, where he covered networking technology, IoT, and cybersecurity. He is also the author of multiple books and previously contributed to publications such as the Boston Globe, Milford Daily News, and DefenceWeb.