Flow Studio App v1.2 Updates

February and March was really busy for us here at Flow Studio.

Catherine is now wearing multiple hats and helping on Flow Studio in so many needed areas. You’ll see her a lot from here on.

Learn Flow Studio

First, we launched Learn Flow Studio - this is where we are publishing content, blog and newsletters regarding Flow Studio App. All of our previous documentation is moving here, and we’re not done yet! There are more articles to write.

Flow Studio - what’s changed in v1.2

• Flow Studio App needed a backend cache library update - we took this opportunity to update our IndexedDB library from LocalForage to DexieDB. LocalForage doesn’t seem to be updated for some time, so the change looks necessary. We started this work on December 26, 2023.
  With this change in mind, we reworked the cache layer, giving us much better performance when we have lots of flows and flow runs. This is was quite a big change, the changes stayed in our dev branch for several months.

• We fixed up a lot of labels, help text and links to learn flow studio.

• We fixed Flow Studio migrate - removed operationMetadataId from being detected by the migrate wizard. There’s just too many guids it picked up.

• We combined Flows and Flows (Solutions), so now everyone can see their solution flows in the free tier.

• Made improvements to Full Text Search, when searching flow actions with “Compose This” we will also check for “Compose_This”. We also added RegExp search. Read more about this on learn.

Flow Studio App - roadmap / coming soon

• At a high level, we are looking at moving more scanning to the background, giving users better control over the periodic scanning of the Power Platform, and rely on the IndexedDB cache to provide instant rendering of the Flow Studio App UI.

• We want to start working on improving our user account management, including managing multiple license assignments and delegation.

• We also are looking forward to implementing the Favourites feature.

Check out Flow Studio App

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.

Tips on fixing Power BI dynamic value

In Power BI we have the ability to use dynamic value within a text block, this allows us to create dynamic paragraphs with data that automatically update.

The problem is, the way we specify the dynamic value is via Power BI Q&A - this can be a giant hit or miss, when it miss - it’s a frustrating experience.

Tip 1 - just use a measure (with a unique name)

The first tip then is to create our own measure with a unique name so that it can’t be confused with anything else. Within our measure, we can use DAX and write specifically what we want the dynamic value to be.

We can add a Card visual to inspect what the value of our measure is. This makes debugging the measure quite simple.

Tip 2 - use the Q&A setup, particularly, to set up the synonyms

I encountered a new problem today, no matter what I tried - Power BI did not recognize the measure (or even the new table that I was looking for). I went into Q&A setup and added simpler, unique names to the measure as well as the table via the Synonyms dialog within Q&A setup, but Power BI was just unable to recognize it.

Tip 3 - too many entities

I tried to export the Linguistic schema (beware this is a YAML file) to see what’s wrong with the model, and that’s when I got this new error message.

So I went back to the Synonyms dialog and unchecked “Include in Q&A” on several entity tables that did not need to be included, and as soon as I did this, dynamic value suddenly can find my measure by name, and link up what I want to render correctly.

I wanted to write this down as it may help others. This ate 2 hours of time for two people, and we created a bunch of rubbish name entities and measure names that I now need to go clean up…

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.