Bringing in Power Apps application Data in your ALM work flows

<DRAFT!!!!!!!!!>

The suggested best practice to backing up and recovering or ALM deployments of Power Apps is to use solutions.

Unfortunately exporting and importing a solution doesn’t bring the application data with the entity(Table) definitions.

I have been playing with the ALM workflows and wanted to share how you can automate data retrieval when importing your solutions.

The first step is to use Power Apps solutions for your application.

The next step is to extract the schema and data that your application relies on to run. (If you don’t have a solution that uses data skip this step)

While you can also automate this (see below the Power shell automation process) I did it manually with the DataMigrationUtility that comes with the

Download tools from NuGet (Developer Guide for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement) | Microsoft Docs

(DataMigrationUtility tool)

The next step is to import your solution into a new environment. If you don’t have a solution to play with I have created a solution a for the App in a Day training that contain tables for the Devices and Manufactures.

You can find that here: <link>

But like I mentioned above the application is imported with out the data it needs to work. To populate those entities (Tables) we could do it manually using the DatamigrationUIlity Tool like I did to export the data but since we will likely want to automate this let’s use Pwower shell:

 

$cred = Get-Credential

$crmConn = Get-CrmConnection -OrganizationName ContosoEnviroment -OnLineType Office365 -Credential $cred

Import-CrmDataFile -CrmConnection app -Datafile “Data.zip” -Verbose