Changing connections in a Flow

One of the best practices for Flow is to have key workflows run under a service account that has elevated permissions and possibly a higher Flow license.  This provides for more flexibility and potentially shorter workflow completion times.

At the same time, it is not preferable to give all Flow makers within an organization access to the service account (for obvious reasons).  Through this approach, you can have your makers develop and test the Flows.  Once they are ready for production use, they then need to be updated to use the service account connections.  But how do you do this?

There are a few approaches you can take to achieve this as discussed below.

Sharing Flow with Service Account

Sharing a Flow with the service account allows an admin to log in with the service account credentials and see and modify the service account.  Owners of the flow will have full access to all connections in the flow and the content within the connected accounts. Owners are not required to add connections to their own accounts, and can take any actions in existing connections and their content.

If they add new connections, they will default to using the original creator's account.

This approach works, but you need to carefully consider the implications of having some actions run under the Flow maker's account rather than the service account.

Changing Action Connections to Service Account

A second option available is to change the connection for the actions that require to be updated to that of the service account.  First though, an admin will have to log in once in order to create that connection and make it available to the Flow.  If the Flow is a simple one with only a few actions, then you can take this approach; however, if the Flow is complex with dozens or more actions, then this approach may not be feasible.

There are two side-effects you need to consider with this approach:

Resetting of Default Values

When changing the connection on an action, some fields will reset to their default values.  This can be frustrating, especially if your actions have many fields (such as in Dynamics 365 or SharePoint actions).

Changing Connections fails

If you've tried changing connections on an action to another existing action, you may have noticed the following behaviour - the the Flow canvas will blank out and you're not able to proceed.

Don't worry; you did nothing wrong.  Looking at the browser developer tools reveals that there's some issue with the way Flow is handling this request.

So what do you do if you still need to change the connection for an action?  A work-around is to create a new connection.  You may end up with multiple connections for the same account, which is fine.  Alternatively you can delete old connections for the same account.

Creating New Connections

The way you create a new connection for an action is by selecting the + Add new connection from the action menu.

Once you've authenticated with the connection service, you can then use it in your Flow.

Deleting Old Connections

From the Flow menu, select Connections.  

Then, select the duplicate connections you no longer need and delete them.  When deleting old connections you need to carefully consider if any of your other Flows are using them, as these Flows may stop working until their actions referencing the connections are re-authenticated.

Exporting and Importing Flow

A third option you have is to export your Flow from the current account and then re-import it.  During the import process, Flow will ask what connections should be used in the Flow.  At this point, you have the opportunity to select the Flow service account you have created.  All actions that were using a specific account before will be using the newly selected account.

Exporting your Flow

Start by exporting your flow into a Zip file as shown below.

Once selected to export, you will be prompted for a Name and be able to set the Package Content.  You can leave the latter as the default values as you have the option to modify them during import.

After you've exported, log onto the service account, open Flow, and from the top menu, select Import.  Select the file that you exported in the previous step.  Now, you will be presented with the screen below. 

Go ahead and update the import option (Update or New) as needed.  The related resources section is where you have an opportunity to change the different account(s) you want to use in the flow.  Once you've updated them with the correct accounts, click Import and you will now have a copy of the Flow to be used with the service account credentials.