CDS (current environment) connector is playing hide and seek?

By | November 17, 2019

Have you ever seen a connector playing hide and seek? Just look at the recording below:

  • Common Data Service (Current Environment Connector) does not show up when I type “related records” on the first screen
  • But it does show up when I do it on the other screen

currentenvconnector

What’s the difference?

From what I could see so far, the only difference is that, in the first case, my Flow is created outside of the solution. In the second case, I’m creating a Flow within a solution.

But, that magic aside, if you have not seen that connector yet, it’s definitely worth looking at since we are getting additional functionality there:

  • FetchXML
  • Relate/Unrelate records
  • Actions
  • There is a unified on update/create/delete trigger

 

And, also, this connector can be deployed through your solutions without having to update the connections.

Actually, it’s a bit more complicated. If you deploy the Flow with such a connector through a managed solution, it will start working in the new environment.

BUT. If you choose to look at that flow in the new environment, you’ll notice that the connections are broken, so you won’t be able to change anything in the Flow until you fix the connections.

Here, notice how the Flow ran a few times:

image

But the connections, if you decide to look at them, are broken:

image

The trick with this connector is not to touch those connectionsSmile Just leave them be, deploy that flow through a solution, and, probably, don’t forget to delete the solution when deploying an updated version of the Flow (for more details on this, have a look at the previous post )

2 thoughts on “CDS (current environment) connector is playing hide and seek?

  1. Linn Zaw Win

    I don’t quite get the part “The trick with this connector is not to touch those connections”. Is it referring to the removal of the unmanaged layer after updating connection as mentioned in the previous post?

    Reply
    1. Alex Shlega Post author

      It’s literally if you had a flow which would be using CDS(current env) connector only, you would not need to do anything in the destination environment after deploying that flow there through a managed solution. It would just start to work. Although, if you went to see the connections, they would show up as broken. Even more, you would see changes in the unmanaged layer right after deploying that flow, so you may have to remove & redeploy to solution to apply Flow updates. I think some of that may still be work in progress, since, eventually, it’s probably supposed to work seamlessly with solution updates.

      Reply

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