In this article, we will learn about Power Apps dataflows and how to use dataflows within the PowerApps?

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What are Power Apps Dataflows?

Dataflow is a collection of tables “collection of data” that are created and managed in environments in the Power Apps service.

• Dataflows allow users to connect with business data and extract this data from a wide range of data sources.
• Dataflows support
  • On-premise data,
  • Cloud data,
  • And software as service data sources (SaaS).
• You can create Power Apps dataflows from the make powerapps site.

Power Apps DataFlows Characteristics

There are some important notes that we have to take in consideration when creating the Power Apps Dataflows:

• Dataflows are created in one environment, this means that you will only be able to see and manage them from that environment. And if any user wants to get data from these dataflows they must have access to the environment in which the dataflows were created.
• Dataflow has only one owner “ the person who created this Dataflow”.
• The dataflow owner is the only one who can edit his own Dataflow.
• Authorization and access to data depending on the destination you loaded the data to.
  • If your destination is Dataverse then any person that wants to access the data needs to be authorized to Dataverse.
  • By using the Power Platform Dataflow connector the access requires membership within the environment that dataflow was created in.
• When importing tables that have a relationship, make sure to import the parent table before the child ones to correctly map them.

How to Import data using DataFlows?

The Dataflow clean, transform the data and load it into

• Dataverse, which Lets you securely store and manage data to use in Power Apps and Power Automate.
• Or to the organization azure data lake gen2 storage, that Lets you collaborate with people in your organization using Power BI, Azure Data, and AI services or custom-built line-of-business applications that read data from the lake, and the data is stored in Common Data Model folders.

Once you create the data flow, you can use these data within Power Apps using Common Data Service connector or Power BI Desktop Dataflow connector, Choosing the connector depending on which destination you choose when creating the dataflow.

• The Data loaded into Dataverse will be available via the Common Data Service Connector.
• Some organizations might want to use their own storage for the creation and the management of dataflows. Then they load the data into the organization’s Azure Data Lake Gen2 storage. Then the data will be available via the Power Platform Dataflow connector.

How to Create Power Apps Dataflow?

To create a dataflow in Power Apps, you have to do the following:

1. Define the destination to load the output data to.
2. The source to get the data from.
3. Use the Power Query.
4. Schedule dataflow runs.
5. Use the data you loaded to the destination storage.

In this section, we will explain how to create a Dataflow in Power Apps from

• SharePoint List.
• Excel File

Create a PowerApps Dataflow using SharePoint List

In this demo, we have explained how to create Power Apps Dataflow using SharePoint list.

Create a PowerApps Dataflow using Excel File

In this section, we will go step by step to Create a PowerApps Dataflow from Excel file by doing the following:

Steps

1. To create Dataflows in Power Apps, open the make powerapps site.
2. From the left navigation, expand the Data section and click Dataflows.

3. Click on New dataflow, you can create your dataflow from blank or from import template. In our case, we will create dataflow from blank.

4. Enter a meaningful name for your workflow, and click create.

5. A Power Query popup will open for you to choose your data source.
6. Select the data source where you will get your data from, this destination can be on-premises and cloud-based data sources including Excel, Azure SQL Database, SharePoint, Azure Data Explorer, Salesforce, Oracle database, and more.
7. In our case, we will use Excel as a data source.

8. then the next step is to connect to your data source, in our case we will connect for the excel file in One Drive .

9. It will list the tables from your Excel. So choose your table that you want to transform the data from, and click Transform Data.

10. This will navigate you to the data flow editor, to shape your data. You can use the advanced editor in the above, to see and modify the code created by the query editor.
11. After that click next

12. Now, you will be asked to map your data, you can map it to a new table or load to an existing table or don’t load.
13. In our case, we will choose to load the data into new table. Once you’ve completed your selections, you are ready to the next step.

14. The next step is selecting the refresh frequency of your dataflow. Dataflows use a data refresh process to keep data up to date.
15. You can choose to refresh manually or automatically and define the schedule to refresh the data. 
16. After finishing click create.

17. Great, your dataflow is currently refreshing, and available in the Dataflows section.

18. If you navigate to the Dataverse tables, you will see the table that we just map the data to. And then you can check your data in the Data tab as shown below.

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Conclusion

You can create Dataflows to connect to and extract your data from a wide range of data sources in Power Apps.

In this article, we have listed the main characteristics of Power Apps Dataflows and provided two demos to create Power Apps Dataflows from the SharePoint list, and from the Excel file.

See Also

• What Is Microsoft Dataverse?
• Connectors in a Power Apps.
• Learn Power Apps – Free Course.