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URL: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/dataverse-cloud-power-automate.rst

⇱ Integrate Microsoft Dataverse Data into Automated Tasks with Power Automate

Integrate Microsoft Dataverse Data into Automated Tasks with Power Automate

👁 Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Use CData Connect AI to connect to Microsoft Dataverse data and integrate live Microsoft Dataverse data into your Power Automate tasks.

Microsoft Power Automate is an online service that automates events (known as workflows) across the most common apps and services. When paired with CData Connect AI, you get instant, cloud-to-cloud access to Microsoft Dataverse data for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to connect to Connect AI from Power Automate and integrate live Microsoft Dataverse data into your workflows and tasks.

CData Connect AI provides a pure SQL, cloud-to-cloud interface for Microsoft Dataverse, allowing you to easily integrate with live Microsoft Dataverse data in Power Automate — without replicating the data. CData Connect AI looks exactly like a SQL Server database to Power Automate and uses optimized data processing out of the box to push all supported SQL operations (filters, JOINs, etc) directly to Microsoft Dataverse, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return Microsoft Dataverse data.

About Microsoft Dataverse Data Integration

CData provides the easiest way to access and integrate live data from Microsoft Dataverse (formerly the Common Data Service). Customers use CData connectivity to:

  • Access both Dataverse Entities and Dataverse system tables to work with exactly the data they need.
  • Authenticate securely with Microsoft Dataverse in a variety of ways, including Azure Active Directory, Azure Managed Service Identity credentials, and Azure Service Principal using either a client secret or a certificate.
  • Use SQL stored procedures to manage Microsoft Dataverse entities - listing, creating, and removing associations between entities.

CData customers use our Dataverse connectivity solutions for a variety of reasons, whether they're looking to replicate their data into a data warehouse (alongside other data sources)or analyze live Dataverse data from their preferred data tools inside the Microsoft ecosystem (Power BI, Excel, etc.) or with external tools (Tableau, Looker, etc.).


Getting Started


Configure Microsoft Dataverse Connectivity for Power Automate

Connectivity to Microsoft Dataverse from Power Automate is made possible through CData Connect AI. To work with Microsoft Dataverse data from Power Automate, we start by creating and configuring a Microsoft Dataverse connection.

  1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
    2. 👁 Adding a Connection
  2. Select "Microsoft Dataverse" from the Add Connection panel
    3. 👁 Selecting a data source
  3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Microsoft Dataverse.

    You can connect without setting any connection properties for your user credentials. Below are the minimum connection properties required to connect.

    • InitiateOAuth: Set this to GETANDREFRESH. You can use InitiateOAuth to avoid repeating the OAuth exchange and manually setting the OAuthAccessToken.
    • OrganizationUrl: Set this to the organization URL you are connecting to, such as https://myorganization.crm.dynamics.com.
    • Tenant (optional): Set this if you wish to authenticate to a different tenant than your default. This is required to work with an organization not on your default Tenant.

    When you connect the Common Data Service OAuth endpoint opens in your default browser. Log in and grant permissions. The OAuth process completes automatically.

    👁 Configuring a connection (Salesforce is shown)
  4. Click Save & Test
  5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Microsoft Dataverse Connection page and update the User-based permissions. 👁 Updating permissions

Add a Personal Access Token

When connecting to Connect AI through the REST API, the OData API, or the Virtual SQL Server, a Personal Access Token (PAT) is used to authenticate the connection to Connect AI. It is best practice to create a separate PAT for each service to maintain granularity of access.

  1. Click on the Gear icon () at the top right of the Connect AI app to open the settings page.
  2. On the Settings page, go to the Access Tokens section and click Create PAT.
  3. Give the PAT a name and click Create. 👁 Creating a new PAT
  4. The personal access token is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy it and store it securely for future use.

With the connection configured and a PAT generated, you are ready to connect to Microsoft Dataverse data from Power Automate.

Connecting to CData Connect AI

To use Connect AI to integrate Microsoft Dataverse data into your Power Automate tasks, you need a new SQL Server connection:

  1. Log in to Power Automate
  2. Click Data -> Connections -> New connection
  3. Select SQL Server 👁 Creating a new SQL Server Connection
  4. In the connection wizard:

    • Choose to connect directly
    • Set SQL server name to tds.cdata.com,14333
    • Set SQL database name to the name of the Microsoft Dataverse connection (e.g. CDS1)
    • Set Username to a Connect AI user (e.g. [email protected])
    • Set Password to the PAT for the above user
    • Click Create 👁 Connecting to Connect AI

Integrating Microsoft Dataverse Data into Power Automate Tasks

With the connection to Connect AI configured, you are ready to integrate live Microsoft Dataverse data into your Power Automate tasks.

  1. Log in to Power Automate
  2. Click My flows -> New flow and choose to create the flow from blank or template
  3. Add (or configure) a SQL Server action (like Get rows) and configure the action to connect to your Connect AI connection
  4. Select a Table to work with (from the drop-down menu) and configure any advanced options (like filters, orders, etc) 👁 Getting Microsoft Dataverse "Rows"
  5. Configure any actions to follow and test, then save the flow

SQL Access to Microsoft Dataverse Data from Cloud Applications

Now you have a direct connection to live Microsoft Dataverse data from Power Automate tasks. You can create more connections and workflows to drive business — all without replicating Microsoft Dataverse data.

To get SQL data access to hundreds of SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources directly from your cloud applications, sign up for a free trial of CData Connect AI.

Related Power Automate Articles

This article explains how to use CData Connect AI with Power Automate (Online). Check out our other articles for more ways to work with Power Automate Desktop: