Evolving Power Platform Flows as solution aware elements

We’ve been creating Flows since the beginning. At that time, Flow was not solution aware. When this feature was originally introduced, Flows were created in the flow interface, and they lived on their own, outside of a solution.

This approach, while usable, created some problems, in particular related to management of Flows, deployment and ongoing support.

Recently, with the move to the new versions of the platform and the extension of the Power Platform over the entire ecosystem, we can finally include Flows in a solution.

Going forward, that’s a good practice. You should always include as many artifacts as possible (yes, there are still some artifacts that are not solution aware) into solutions. That makes it much easier to transport customizations, and manage everything in one place.

So, now what do you do with the Flows you already created? Simple, you can take existing Flows and include them in your solution.

Let’s first have a look at the available Flows. I have a Demo Flow, as seen below, that is a personal Flow, visible under My flows.

Looking at Solutions, I have a solution created, called Demo Flow Solution, as seen below.

Open the solution, and from the ribbon above, expand Add Existing and select Flow, as shown below.

on the pop-up slider select the Outside solutions tab. You will find here the listing of all Flows that are “orphaned”, as shown below.

Select the Flow and click Add. After a few moments of processing, you are returned back to the solution structure, and you will find the newly added Flow listed in the solution components, as seen below.

And now, you have a Flow properly packaged and available to be moved with the rest of your solution components.

Note that the connections remain the same, and you should check to make sure the Flow is enabled in your environment, and that the connections do point to the new correct environment. We need to wire-up the connections correctly. By default, the new imported flows coming with a solution are in a disabled state to allow for this configuration to take place.

This functionality is only available starting with version 9.1 and later.

And, as everything else, this functionality will evolve over time to allow for a more advanced experience.

As you are preparing your transition to the Unified Interface, one of the things to consider is a general clean-up, which would include adding the needed Flows into the relevant solutions they need to move with. This way, you simplify future deployments and observe best practices.

Do you still manage Flows outside of Solutions? Have you already included your Flows in Solutions? Leave a note below and let me know what your experience is so far.