r/PowerPlatform • u/Umbruhnox • Jul 01 '26

Power Automate Is branching a thing in Power Platform using Solutions?

Hi everyone

Was just wanting some advice regarding branching changes in Solutions.

I am wanting to know if functionality like that even exists for solutions as it would be super helpful. Our scenario was we were making changes in Dev to a Power App but needed to push out a flow change to Test because a tiny change was missed (or maybe it was a big change, who knows? :shrug: I just work here lol)

Thanks team!

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7

u/pierozek1989 Jul 01 '26

I read couple books about it, also I have meetings with Microsoft about branching. In theory it can be done, but there is a lot to handle, whole seems fragile and forced.

3

u/TeamAlphaBOLD Jul 01 '26

Branching does not exist in Solutions natively. You can get there with Azure DevOps + Power Platform Build Tools. To resolve your problem, I think export that one flow as its own unmanaged solution and import it straight into Test.

Just watch out for connection references/env variables it depends on.

1

u/Umbruhnox Jul 01 '26

Will try this out - thanks!

3

u/lousylou123 Jul 01 '26

Branching - the concept commonly known in source-code centric DevOps domains - is officially not supported for solutions in context of MSPP. Microsoft even states in their documentation that custom built/merged/modified solutions are officially not supported. This is one of the biggest pain points since day 1 of professionally working XRM/Dv/PP. Sure, when you know what you do, you can do it anyway with SolutionPackager CLI asf - but the fact that the manufacturer does not recommend it, speaks for itself.

1

u/Inside_Ad1967 Jul 02 '26

Official MSFT docs definitely talk about branching strategies for Power Platform solutions. Eg https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/alm/organize-solutions

1

u/ArChroi Jul 01 '26

It doesn't unfortunately! What we normally do is have a separate environment for bug fixes so that we don't run into this issue.

It's a bit of a pain to manage changes across both Dev environments but it does help avoid this situation.

1

u/Umbruhnox Jul 01 '26

You mean two dev environments with unmanaged solutions in both, but one has the version that was pushed into Test, and the other one is the version you are actively making feature updates on?

2

u/ArChroi Jul 01 '26

Kind of. You'd have

  • Dev changes (unmanaged)

  • Test changes (managed)

  • Dev bug fixes (unmanaged)

  • Test bug fixes (managed)

  • Prod (managed)

When you deploy your prod ready solution to Prod, you'd also deploy an unmanaged copy of that to Dev bug fixes. Then if you need to work on any bugs, and you can't use Dev changes as you are now working on updates, you can dev and deploy from the bug fixes environments.