Get App ID with List Records in Power Automate

The new UCI and the ability to have several model driven apps changed the playground a lot for us ol’ dynamics folks. It brought shiny new capabilities and flexibility but it also brought a tiny bit of more complexity to the game. Suddenly when you want to send an e-mail with a record URL you need to define which model driven app to display to record from. No longer a workflow with a simple “insert record URL”. So what’s the easiest way to get that darn app ID?

Use Case

Have you also had that requirement? That old one that never seem to die where the customer wants an e-mail with a record URL in it so he/she doesn’t need to go in to the system if not absolutely necessary. Sigh. Well, it happens still, and usually I try and challenge the requirement but sometimes it actually is necessary, and I had to build a flow to solve exactly that for colleague of mine recently.

Model-driven App Entity

There is an entity called Model-Driven Apps (appmodules) that are not searchable among the entities in the maker portal.

Therefore it might be a bit difficult to explore, but it contains the model -driven apps in your environment and you can use it as an entity in a power automate action.

Search for the Common Data Service (current environment) connector (read why and how to use that connector here), and use the List records action.

Generally when wanting an App ID you usually only want one result – so make sure you filter your List record action. I of course use FetchXML Builder in XrmToolBox to secure my filter and my result.

Also select your attributes in your action (select query). Choose only the attribute you want to use to make it more clean and proper. I once heard a great analogy regarding the List Record action

The List Record action is not a buffet, it’s an a la carte menu.

You do not order the whole menu of food and then pick an choose what to eat. That would be too expensive. You decide before hand what to order and make sure you consume it all.

That’s it. Now you have you’re app ID ready to use.

Want more info?

If you’d like to read a detailed blog posts with all the steps on how send a record URL with Power Automate, I would recommend you to read this post written by Linn Zaw Win. He uses environment variables to get the app ID which is another way of doing it.

Toodles.