This article is part of the Working with Power Automate Solutions series and of the larger Working with Power Automate series I am writing on my experiences working with the Power Automate, which is part of the Power Platform from Microsoft. I also have a related series of articles on Power Automate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC.
A solution is how you can implement ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) with Power Automate. A simple way of viewing a solution is that it is a container of related flows and other components (connections, environment variables, and so on) which are part of the same project, which makes it easy to find everything in one place.
Solutions can also be used to transfer their contents from one environment to another for deployment
An example of this would be an VAR or ISV, I work for a company which os both, creating a solution for a client on our internal systems, or in one of their sandbox environments, and then exporting the solution to then import into their QA environment for testing before then deploying into their production environment.
Solutions can, in very simple terms, be unmanaged, which means the components can be changed, or they can be managed, which means the components cannot be changed; a production environment should never contain an unmanaged solution. I’ll cover the types of solution (unmanaged and managed) in more detail in the next article of this series.
The table below outlines the actions with a solution which help support ALM:
| Action | Description |
|---|---|
| Create | Author and export unmanaged solutions. |
| Update | Create updates to a managed solution that are deployed to the parent managed solution. You can’t delete components with an update. |
| Upgrade | Import the solution as an upgrade to an existing managed solution, which removes unused components and implements upgrade logic. Upgrades involve rolling up (merging) all patches to the solution into a new version of the solution. Solution upgrades will delete components that existed but are no longer included in the upgraded version. You can choose to upgrade immediately or to stage the upgrade so that you can do some additional actions prior to completing the upgrade. |
| Patch | A patch contains only the changes for a parent managed solution, such as adding or editing components and assets. Use patches when making small updates (similar to a hotfix). When patches are imported, they’re layered on top of the parent solution. You can’t delete components with a patch. |