Updates to Flow Studio App in 2023 October

There’s been a series of updates to Flow Studio App on our development build, as I’m preparing to push this next stable build to production, I thought I’d take this time to list down lots of changes we’ve done in this latest series of updates.

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Production 1.1.51

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Dev 1.1.58

Oh what happened to the red colour!

• Switching UI Control Set towards Fluent 2
  
  We are in the middle of switching the overall look and feel and UX experience from default Telerik component style to the new Telerik + Fluent style, which would be more inline with the experience in Power Platform and also M365.
  

• Switching primary colour from red to a “whale” colour
  
  First is switching away from the red colour - so we can actually use red to indicate serious issues happening elsewhere on the screen that demands your attention, like that "Flow Suspension” notice on the top-right.
  

• On Flows, Flow (Admin) and Flows (solution) screens, we added pagination controls, this greatly helps rendering the grid when you have hundreds of flows.
  Don’t worry, search and sort is applied prior to paging, so it won’t leave you with having to browse through several pages before finding your item.
  

• The grid menu dropdown filter had an bug fix that allows us to select the fields more accurately. Previosuly, the menu often lose focus and we aren’t able to easily select a field to filter.

• Flow Diagram had several fixes

• Approvals tab had more fixes.

• Settings tab is brought back - we will be making lots more user-configurable settings very soon.

• We tidied up the overall page styling and reduce wasted padding around the grid and window (but do give us feedback if we mess something up on your device)

The next lot of updates will begin to drop on dev branch really soon.

Updating Flow Studio's Flow Diagram feature

A customer reached out regarding Flow Diagram in Flow Studio - there was a bug preventing it from being generated. This was probably an issue that had been going on for some time - Flow Diagram was a feature last updated since June 2020. I’m very grateful when customers reach out with an email to ask me to look into something - thank you for bringing this to my attention.

In this case, we had a simple syntax bug, and then an evening of playing with Flow definitions and Mermaid JS graph syntax to give it some overdue love.

In Flow Studio’s drawing, we draw a subgraph whenever we see a scoped action: Scope, If, While, For Each loops. But in Mermaid the arrows must be linked to a node. So Flow Studio draws an imaginary “/End Scope” action, for lines to connect to at the bottom of the graph.

Previous versions don’t attach the line from the end of a scope correctly to the parent, leaving the crazy picture we see on the left.

After this update, we now get the cleaned logical version on the right.

When following “Non Succeeded” run-after path in a flow definition, we now draw a dotted arrow instead of the traditional solid line.
You can try our latest test build on https://dev.flowstudio.app/

Flow Diagrams are designed mainly for makers to document their flows with a diagram. Both Mermaid JS markdown is available, as well as generated image.

Let me know if you have any feedback.

Power Automate API changes - v2 Admin scope now needs user_impersonation

This blog post is about two major updates to Flow Studio App and Flow Studio for Enterprise.

MSAL v2 Update

First one, we finally updated Flow Studio to MSAL v2 there’s a few reasons for this, but primarily, this is because we want to support modern browsers that are now by default disabling 3rd party cookies, which prevented previous authentication via hidden iframe method in earlier versions of MSAL and ADALjs.

Incidentally, this also means Flow Studio App now works on iPad and Safari. And should work better for many customers within enterprise that has 3rd party cookie disabled.

MSAL also supports multiple accounts so that’s an interesting scenario in the future to support multi-user or multi-tenancy? We’ll see.

Power Automate Admin API Scope

Secondly, we have a note on Power Automate API changes and how it affects us.

Power Automate /scopes/admin/v2/ supports fetching up to 250 flows per request prior to paging, by comparison, v1 only supports 50 flows. This means reading flows as admin is once again much quicker.

But we’ve also noticed that admin flow requests now need an additional user_impersonation scope.

“Access Microsoft Flow as signed in user” (nice name!)

When customers login to Flow Studio App v1.1.45 or later, you will be asked to re-consent due to this additional scope.

Power Apps API changes - no longer accept Azure Management token

There has been recently a major change to the API and authorization that Flow Studio uses to access the Power Platform. As we have just pushed the update to production, we want to take a bit of time to write this blog post - why we are doing this, and how it might affect you.

Flow Studio uses a mixture of APIs available through Azure, Microsoft Graph, and Power Platform to provide a tool that lets us focus on our flows, and make sure they continue running successfully. Since the very beginning in 2018, Flow Studio does this by requesting an Azure authorization token when the user logs in. Since the Power Platform APIs sit on top of the Azure platform, this token was sufficient to access across multiple APIs.

In 2021 there was a big update with Power Automate APIs and now in 2023 there's a second update with Power Apps APIs. As a result, we made the decision to switch to granular, Power Platform specific permissions.

Scope, Permissions

"read flows", "manage flows" are required permissions to access Power Automate - see and update your flows, shared flows or solution flows.

"read activities" allows Flow Studio to read recent Power Automate events - we use this to figure out which flows have been running recently.

"read approvals" and "manage approvals" are related to Power Automate's approval feature. Flow Approvals is not an area we currently have major feature development in, but it is a tab that we have available, so we ask for this permission to maintain the feature.  Since Power Automate approvals v2, some of the data is also available via the default solution DataVerse entities. So if you are keen to do some approvals reporting, you can access them that way.

"Power Apps Service API" is for reading Power Apps and Power Platform connections.

"basic profile" is what most apps request to read the user's email address and display name.

"maintain access" is the "offline" access - since Flow Studio is a single web application we store your token in the browser's web storage temporarily (this is standard MSAL functionality).

Trust and Verified Publisher

Flow Studio is a trusted, verified publisher. This tick is provided by Microsoft, and tells our customers that we aren’t some random new app that’s popped up now asking for your permissions. We have been around since 2018, and have operated under Microsoft publisher guidelines in our use of the APIs and the care we have for our customers. If we do a bad thing, Microsoft knows how to find us.

We are a legal company registered in Australia, our office operates out of Sydney.

Path forward for Flow Studio

So from Flow Studio v1.1.41 or later - users will need to re-login and grant the new set of permissions to continue using Flow Studio.

Flow Studio for Teams and Enterprise is updated as of v0.1.070

Other users might be affected by this

• If you use older versions of Power Platform Power Shell

• If you have very old Power Apps connectors created from a long time ago

• If you are using Office CLI to perform some actions on the Power Platform

You may see specific errors referring to "The received access token has been obtained from the wrong audience or resource".

Turning a new page

Wanted to write again, and let everyone know what I’ve been up to. I ended up taking a break through most of 2021 and 2022 simply resting, recovering, and doing light work from home.

2023 resumed with a big bang, I found motivation and drive to dive back into the many projects I’ve temporarily shelved in the last two years. I’ve also became pretty handy with a bunch of home DIY projects. It was a big change to the old me that only knew how to do digital projects but not physical projects. Perhaps more on that in a future post.

Flow Studio

We’ve had several Flow Studio fixes in the last two months

• there was an API pagination fix since the API no longer accepts 250 records at once and restricts us to only 50. (That means more pages and API call takes longer)

• API auth fix relating to Power Apps is in-progress.

• There’s a second API skip/continuation token fix.

• We’ve also tweaked the way trail is applied when anyone wants to try Flow Studio pro - you can sign up and trial will be available for two weeks - you can cancel the subscription before the trial end date to avoid being charged, if Flow Studio isn’t suitable for you.

Clarity / Flow Studio for Teams and Enterprise

We’ve had renewed interest in Flow Studio for Teams and Enterprise (Clarity) through the last few years.

• Flow Studio for Teams will be tweaked to focus on monitoring critical flows and alerting users when their business critical flows fail. This will be priced simply and does not offer governance capabilities.

• Flow Studio for Enterprise will be focused on the turnkey Power Platform Governance story, adding new features to scan more areas of the Power Platform, and integrate with CoE starter kit.

• So far this year, we’ve added BYO Azure Storage. There’s been a lot of fixes to API breakages in Power Apps area this year.

Contract Work

I started a regular part time contract work in Sydney CBD, so if you are local, hit me up for a coffee.

• I’m working with a lot of Power BI reports

• There’s a lot of Power Automate doing the heavy lifting as well.

• We are also talking about adding some Power Apps visuals to allow executive comments to be collected during a report presentation.

Community

Several of the meetups, conferences and events that I used to participate in are becoming active again. I hope to see more of the community not just virtually, but physically as well. I hope to be able to grab a coffee with you soon.