Selecting (Current) in Environment in Power Automate CDS connector and why it matters

If you’re new to Power Automate, you must be wondering why am I given an option to select either (Current) or the actual name of the environment. Why can’t I just select the actual name?
selectEnv

Well, here’s why –

Importing into Other environments

So, when you import your Flow / Power Automate into other environment using a solution, be it from Sandbox to Production or to entirely different org in different tenant, here’s the behavior

(Current) selection

currentSelected

And if you Export this Flow and import into other Organizations, you can simply restore the connections to that organization by simply selecting the connection
authenticateCurrent

And it will be loaded with the current environment(s) as it was on the source environment
currentLoaded

Environment selection

Whereas now, if you have exported the Flow with Environments selected as the particular environment and not (Current) like below –
envSelect

When you import this into other environment, and when you try to authenticate, it will not go through and you’ll see something like this –
corruptedEnv

And if you wonder what the Org name is displayed in the picture above, it’s the Org Unique Name of the source environment
uniqueNameOfOldOrg

And that’s why, it’s critical to select (Current) environment when you develop flows and you know you want to have these imported to other environments.
Here’s Microsoft’s Current Environment connector’s official Docs – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/commondataserviceforapps?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5003911

Hope this helps!

5 thoughts on “Selecting (Current) in Environment in Power Automate CDS connector and why it matters

  1. When we create a flow inside a solution, we will get a connector CDS(Current Environment), the benefit of using this connector is that we don’t have to re-authenticate every time we export the flow.

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    • Yes, so in this case, it doesn’t ask for credentials but simply makes us select the already logged in session. So it’s just a click to set it up upon import. I did this using a solution.

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