Article

Flows from the field: Moving attachments; CDS metadata; Social media analytics; Parallel approvals; Record ID parameters

by Eamon McCarthy Earls
Assistant Editor, MSDynamicsWorld.com

Microsoft Dynamics 365 professionals discuss Power Automate flows for moving attachments out of CDS to SharePoint, making sense of metadata, boosting social media analytics, conducting parallel approvals and assessing flow run histories.

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

Moving attachments from CDS to SharePoint

Linn Zaw Win, writing on Linn's Power Platform Notebook shared how to move an attachment from the File Field of CDS to SharePoint using Power Automate. Microsoft first added File and Image data types to CDS in 2019, which was initially only available for canvas apps. By storing files at the field level, the system is better able to parse different file types. Although useful for most situations, there are still some occasions where users may need to store files in SharePoint rather than the File Field, such as a misalignment of capacity.

For these scenarios, users can put Power Automate to the test. In the case outlined by Win, after triggering when a contact is updated, actions should get the contact record for the item, pull file contents, initialize variables for the SharePoint site, get the document location of the contact record, create a file and populate the new document file URL. 

Win wrote:

Using the file data type field gives you more control on file validation in your solution and by using the Common Data Service (current environment) connector and SharePoint connector in Power Automate, the file uploaded to the 'file' field of Common Data Service can be moved to SharePoint document library and removed from CDS.

Reading CDS metadata attributes

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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.

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