Exporting, Importing, and Distributing Flows

At some point, it may be necessary to be able to move a flow between environments or make a backup copy for archival purposes. There could be several reasons for this, including:

• Promotion from development or test environments to production
• Sharing with other teams or organizations
• Archival or backup
• Publishing to the Power Automate community

Whatever your requirements, Power Automate gives you the ability to back up or export, import, and share your flows.

In this chapter, we’re going to explore the following concepts:

• Exporting a flow
• Importing a flow
• Distributing a flow

By the end of this chapter, you should be comfortable with the processes for exporting (or backing up), restoring (or importing), and sharing flows that others can then import.

Exporting a flow

If you want to back up a flow or make a flow available for use in another environment, you’ll need to export it. Exporting a flow gives you the ability to move it.

A flow can be exported into different formats:

• A package (.zip for importing into Power Automate)
• A Logic Apps template (.json for importing into Logic Apps)

The export format you choose depends on what the target environment is and when your flow was built. The formats are very similar, as Power Automate is built with the same technology as the Logic Apps platform. In this example, we’ll look at the steps for exporting a template for reuse in Power Automate (in either the same or different environments).

The Export to Logic Apps feature is not available for Power Automate flows created after August 2020, as Microsoft changed the protocol used to create flows to the OpenAPI 2.0 standard. Logic Apps is incompatible with this protocol, so the Export...

Importing a flow

Importing a flow allows you to take the exported contents from one environment and reuse the logic. The process is very simple, allowing you to move flows easily between environments.

You’ll want to make sure that the flows you are importing are supported by your environment. Some examples might be:

• Connectors that may not be available in different sovereign clouds (between Office 365 Worldwide, Government Community Cloud, or 21Vianet, for example)
• A custom connector that hasn’t been deployed to the target environment
• Connectors marked as Premium that may have additional purchase or subscription requirements in the target tenant, as shown in Figure 18.4:

Figure 18.4: Reviewing connector types

For examples and information on standard and premium connectors, refer to the following link: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/.

To import a flow, follow these steps:

1. Log in to the Power Automate...

Distributing a flow

If you have exported a flow and want to share it with others, you can do so in several ways:

• By sending the exported .zip file as an email attachment
• By posting the exported .zip file on a file-hosting or sharing site such as OneDrive or Dropbox
• By sending a flow via Power Automate
• By publishing the flow as a template to the gallery

As the first two are relatively simple, we’ll focus on the steps necessary to perform the last two methods: sending a flow via Power Automate and publishing the flow as a template to the gallery. Both of these methods will allow users to download and install their own copy of the flow, as you’ll see.

Sending a flow via Power Automate

When you send a flow via Power Automate, you are allowing the recipients to download and create a copy of the flow. This is different from sharing a flow or converting it to a shared flow, as you learned about in Chapter 7, Working with Shared...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to export, import, send, and publish flows using the Power Automate interface. Exporting allows you to save a copy of a flow for purposes such as archiving, sending to colleagues or external entities, or reimporting into another environment. Importing a flow allows you to take a previously exported flow and bring it into the current environment. Finally, you learned about the two ways in which you can distribute flows in Power Automate – by using either the Send flow or Publish capabilities to make the flow available to others.

In the next chapter, we’ll look at some methods of monitoring and troubleshooting flows.

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