This morning I had a look at an app that security details of a user. The user run my Canvas app and then a flow is triggered that makes an Invoke an HTTP request to collect the groups that the user is part of. But how does this work if you have external users? Internal users First I'm going to have a look at internal users.

We all know that we should use solutions in the Power Platform, but with solution come solution layers. In this post I'm looking at some issues I came across with one of my clients during major migration project.

This week I've been working with a client on creating tables within a solution. We found every now and then AI Skill Configs object being added randomly to our solution. Creating a table I created a table called Car and I added a text column called Brand. The Brand Column is just a simple text column as shown below. AI Skill Config appears within the solution…

Earlier this week a question on Reddit started the idea of this post. You have a table in Dataverse then you add a new column and you want to bulk update this column for all existing records to a specific value. How would you approach this? Some suggestions Within the comments of the post I saw various suggestions to get this job done.

This morning on Reddit someone asked in the Power Automate community "How do I loop through each character in a string?". Well this isn't too complicated, although you would hope that a single action could do the job for you. The solution is slightly more complicated than that. Create your flow I'm going to start with the setup of a manual trigger and a compose action that gives me a text of 6 characters.

When you implement multiple workspaces to support Development, Test, UAT and Production with Dataflows in Fabric then it is critical to make sure that you create generic Dataflows. Generic dataflows make it easy to deploy your dataflows between the various environments using deployment pipelines. Dataflows There are a few elements within dataflows that could become a challenge when we deploy our Gen2 Dataflows.

In this post I'm looking at performance of Power Automate flows. For some flows this may not really matter too much, however when you have a need to high performance flows the findings in this post may be quite important. To make your flows perform well, it is important to understand where time is wasted.

I will start this post with a warning about the New Designer Run After settings. The steps described in this post do not make it easier to understand what your flow will do. But I'm sure someone will comment on this post with a "That is exactly what I need"

Today I'm looking at the Tenant Level Analytics setting. The Power Platform Admin Center is getting more and more features that we would have used the Center of Excellence for in the past. Like the Inventory and Usage sections. The Tenant Level Analytics setting also enables some interesting insights into the usage of the Power Platform within your organisation.

On a Power Platform with multiple developers Connections and Connection references can be tricky. You have some connection references added to a solution by a colleague, now you want to use these connection references and this is where the troubles start. Connection references access Depending on your security roles you may or may not be able to see someone else's…

For many years I've been saying, don't use variables in Power Automate as it hurts the flow's performance. Recently it was pointed out to me that variables don't lock Apply to Each loops. But is it safe to use variables in loops? My Variables inside Apply to each Test flow I created a flow that will process an array of 100 items, using an Apply to each step.

This post is all about how to block unmanaged customizations within production environments. I'm going to assume that you have followed the advice of creating a Development, Test, UAT and Production environment. And that each of these environments should be treated in a very different way.

Recently I needed to deploy parts of a solution to a test environment. I also had to be able to rollback the solution. Solution Patches within the Power Platform can help with this. In this post I'm looking at how Solution patches work.

We all like useful error messages. How about the [REDACTED] Message when you turn on a flow? In this post you will find the steps to fix this issue.

How often do you want to find a flow, but you can't remember which environment you created the flow in? It can be quite a challenge to find your flows back when you have many environments. Multiple Environments Maybe having one default environment did have some benefits. It was easy to find the right environment for your flows. No, I'm not recommending going back to the default environment,

Recently I worked on a project using Microsoft Fabric where I needed to create a connection to an API that used Bearer tokens to access the data. In this post some of the challenges that I hit. General setup In Fabric I created the various workspaces, Lake houses and dataflows that I need to created the import from my API. Following the medallion approach I'm importing the data from my API into my Lakehouse database.

Copy and Paste has existed for a while in the classic Power Automate UI. With the new UI however there are a few additional features in this area worth to be aware of.

Ok, Code Apps are hot at the moment. But which type of Code Apps are we talking about? Have you created your first Vibe Coded App through Or did you use the Power platform CLI approach?

Have you ever battled with connection references in Power Automate? If not, you probably haven't worked on projects with multiple developers or you aren't using solutions to deploy your flows. In this post I'm covering how to deal with connections, connection references when you have multiple developers.

Do you rename controls in Power Apps? Well of course you do! What if you have an app with many controls and they all use the out of the box names? It can becomes quite a task to name your controls properly. In this post the quick trick to get all controls renamed with Copilot within seconds.

Do you use Dev, Test, UAT and Production environments within you Power Platform. Would you like to show your environment name in the app so that you don't get confused? In this post I'm showing you a quick trick to get the environment name to display in you app.

As a software developer, I like to have control over what I get. Does Vibe Coding give you what you expect? In this post I'm gong through some of the experiences that you might have had too. Will Power Apps Vibe coding work for you?

Sometimes it is useful to create small helper flows to get a small tasks done. Today I needed to check if a file exists or not and all I had was the URL of the site and the file path.

Following last week's post about using a single patch to replace Patch inside ForAll, I was asked about, how to not only update multiple items, but also create new items in SharePoint lists. Although this is not difficult, there is a small trick needed. In this post all the details. Patch in Forall to update multiple items In the post mentioned above we saw that rather than using a patch inside a ForAll to update many items, we can also use a single patch to update existing records.

Yesterday, on Reddit I saw a question asked about Nesting a Patch inside a ForAll loop. Is a Patch function inside a ForAll loop, to update many records, the most efficient way to update your records?

A few years back I wrote a post about how to write a filter query for Excel in Power Automate. Today I found an issue with number columns in filter queries while working with a client on a flow.

Toolbar or custom menu components? How do you develop your navigation controls in your app? During Power Apps projects I see many different ways clients have implemented navigation controls, in this post some of the options. I'm of course concluding with the easiest and most manageable way of getting your menus sorted out.

Within Dataverse we can configure date fields in 5 different ways. When we use these fields in a Power Apps Canvas App they will behave slightly different. Today on the SharePains chat I was asked about the Modern Date Picker control and the Time Zone Independent setting. In this post I'm looking at all of the options.

Following my post about migrating from the Classic Controls to Modern Controls, today a bit of a closer look at the Modern Combo box.

Have you considered moving you Canvas Apps from Classic Controls to Modern Controls? Unfortunately it isn't as easy as just replacing each control. In this post I'll help you find the matching controls and their properties.

Recently a few times I've been asked about how to make controls visible or invisible depending on the value selected in dropdowns, combo boxes and various other controls. In this post I'm going through the most common controls used for this.

As the SharePoint Embedded connector was released last night, I thought it would be useful to start a series of posts about SharePoint Embedded within the Power Platform.

Why does Microsoft hide the best practices in the Power Platform? In this post I will go through some best practices that aren't always obvious to find.

How do you convert CSV files to JSON? When you have data in CSV format and you want to use this within Power Automate, there used to be a lot of splitting by end of lines, commas and various other challenges. Nowadays, converting CSV files to JSON can be done in an easier way.

Hardly ever, I've seen a software change take so long for people to accept. How long will it be before developers just get on with as the new designer in Power Automate? Some people end up using it, but the majority of the experienced flow developers still use the old designer most of the time.

Following my earlier post about creating an agent flow. I'm now writing about error handling in Agent Flows. How do we handle basic failures within agent flows?

If you're new to agent flows, this post will help you get started. I'll share more about agent flows in upcoming posts.

How do you write 1,234.56? Do you have a decimal dot or a decimal comma? Well most likely this depends on where you live. How do you deal with this in Power Apps?

Power Automate has quite a few string functions that can help you sort out textual issue. Two of these functions are Substring and Slice. Do you know the difference?

Recently the Run a generative action was added to Power Automate. To make this action work is not as easy as you might hope.

Yesterday on Reddit I was asked about how to collect and send community news articles from websites using Power Automate so that news letters can be sent out to colleagues. Of course my initial response was to get some AI to do the trick. And Power Automate has that useful Run a prompt action for this

Yesterday, I looked at how to filter data when making an API call using the HTTP action and noticed that filtering data isn't always straight forward. In this post, you will find the details on how to filter data in Power Automate.

How often would you like to count the number of records without really wanting to load all the records that exist in a list or table. CountRows, CountIf, CountA and Count are four functions to get a record count in Power Apps. In this post you will find the best ways to get your record count.

In recent months, I have begun using Power Automate Desktop for automated testing within Power Apps. In this post I will have a look at how we can organise UI elements in our PAD flow a bit better.

At the end of 2025, I already announced on LinkedIn that SharePains.com is 15 years old. After nearly 1100 posts about Microsoft Tech in 15 years, it is time to celebrate.

Earlier this week I was asked to reshape data in Power Automate. Having an array of data that needs to be reshaped just sot that an API can take the data can be tricky. So often I find clients using the Append to array action inside an apply to each. Now if your array only has a few records it probably doesn't matter too much but what if you have 1000s of records?

Recently I've been receiving email reporting Your flow has a new trigger URL. In this post I will address this issue and how to avoid your flows breaking.

When you open an app in Power Automate Desktop, and you need to run this Power Automate Desktop flow multiple times it becomes important to handle the multiple instances of your browser. In this post the steps to make this work for you.

When you use multiple environments (and you always should do) in the Power Platform, then it is almost impossible to avoid environment variables. Each environment variable can have default and current values. What is the difference between default and current?

When actions in Power Automate flows go wrong, they may rerun depending on the failure occurred. One of the errors that may trigger is the 429 Error that is reported when there are throttling issues