Article

Flows from the field: Sentiment analysis; Portals; Date and time; D365 Customer Service; Run-only users

by Eamon McCarthy Earls
Assistant Editor, MSDynamicsWorld.com

Dynamics 365 professionals put Power Automate to work for sentiment analysis, triggering flows from Power Apps Portals, pulling dates and times and more.

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

Conducting sentiment analysis

Power Virtual Agents provides powerful tooling around sentiment analysis. On By the Devs, Yash Agarwal explored how to configure sentiment analysis with Power Automate. In this setup, customers can enter a concern and have it input by Power Automate, processed for sentiment analysis, and then return a response. Using an HTTP request as the trigger, Agarwal's flow called a virtual agent action, feeding information to Azure Text Analytics.

He defined low and normal sentiment scores and aligned a Text Analytics resource with Power Automate, using a connector to pass a key while creating the connection.

Triggering flows from Power Apps Portals

Microsoft MVP Nick Doelman, writing on ReadyXRM noted that the only current way to update records from Power Apps Portals is to use a companion app, web form, or entity form. Among these, companion apps are particularly challenging, accruing technical debt to develop the app. As an alternative, Doelman opted to trigger a Power Automate flow from a portal web page to update records in the Common Data Service, substituting Power Apps Portals as the companion app.

Initially, he built a custom web template and relied on Liquid FetchXML tags to retrieve data, hiding data in an accordion layer for better collapsibility. In place of the companion app, Doelman employed a Power Automate HTTPS request trigger, generated JSON schema and updated the record. Lastly, he recommends testing the flow with tools like Postman. 

Managing dates and times

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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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