Reuse Mapping

Updated by Luka Koczorowski

Reuse Mapping to Power Automate Desktop

It is common to see repetitive tasks as self contained bots that are called upon by other bots. These helper bots can for example, load configuration settings, log error messages, and so forth. Instead of repeating code for every instance, one copy is kept as a standalone bot.

It is also common in large repositories to have identical bots maintained as separate entities.

Blueprint uses a set of heuristics to determine whether a bot is a helper being called upon by more than one parent, or if there exist a set of identical bots. Both of these are candidates for reuse mapping.

Power Automate Desktop (PAD) has two types of Flows: Main Flows (what we call External Flows) or Sub-Flows. Sub-flows are contained as children of external flows and are only accessible by their parent. In order to make a flow reusable between many flows, it has to be an external flow.

The following steps illustrate how a user can discover what is available for reuse and how to map them into PAD

Using Rules Dashboard

Reuse Rules dashboard is currently mostly read-only. The only available functionality is to enable rules or bulk delete rules.

Using CSV

  1. Export CSV

To start using the CSV Rules sheet, the user must export the Rules table to CSV. To do so, from the Rules dashboard, click Advanced -> Export Rules to CSV

The following columns will be auto-populated:

  • Column A ("ScopeId") = Scope for Rule. Blank implies Instance level
  • Column B ("SourceActionType") = REUSABLE_FLOW
  • Column C ("TargetActionType") = EXTERNAL_FLOW
  • Column F ("SourceActionId")  = Checksum
  • Column G ("SourceActionName")= Method Name
  • Column Y ("IsActive") = FALSE
  1. Configure Rules

No configuration is necessary for Reuse Rules. Blueprint will auto generate all necessary values on the next export. The only column that needs to be modified is column Y ("IsActive") needs to be set to TRUE

There may be scenarios where a user wants to make a process reusable that is not auto detected by Blueprint. In those scenarios, please read Manual Reuse

  1. Import Rules CSV

To import rules, from the Rules dashboard, click Advanced -> Import Rules From CSV

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