Adventures with Power Apps: Use Invoker’s Connection? What?

I had a Power Automate flow that was triggered whenever a record was added to a Dataverse table, which would add a new record to another Dataverse table.

Pretty straight forward.

Figure 1 – Flow V1

Or in other words, whenever a record was added to Dataverse Sample 2 - Parent Items, I wanted to add a row to Dataverse Sample 2 - Child Items.

I added a record, the flow fired, and it worked as expected! 🎉

For kicks and grins, I had another person test adding a new record, and it didn’t work so great! ☹️

What went wrong? 🤔

The Created By of the parent record was not the same as the Created By in the child record.

Figure 2 – Different Created By properties

I expected them to be the same.

How was I going to fix this? By enabling Invoke with user's connection on the action that is adding the child row.

I asked Bing Chat about this setting.

Prompt: What is Invoke with user’s connection in Power Automate flow mean?

Invoke with user’s connection is a feature in Power Automate that allows you to use the connection of the user who triggered the flow. This means that the flow will use the credentials of the user who initiated the flow to perform actions on their behalf. This feature can be useful when you want to perform actions that require the user’s permissions or access to their data.

For example, if you have a flow that sends an email to a user when a new item is added to a SharePoint list, you can use Invoke with user’s connection to send the email from the user’s email address instead of a generic email address. This makes the email more personal and helps the user identify the source of the email.

If you want to use Invoke with user’s connection in your flow, you can select this option when configuring the action. This will ensure that the action is performed using the user’s connection instead of a generic connection. If you are using a premium connector, you may need to purchase additional licenses to use this feature.

I made the change.

Figure 3 – Enable Use invoker’s connection

I had the user test it again, and this time around I got the results I expected, both Created By properties were the same.

Figure 4 – Both Created By properties were now the same

Was a bit challenging to figure out, I just expected whatever user triggered the flow would be used throughout the flow … wrong!

Hope this helps a fellow App Maker!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *