Reuse Mapping to Power Automate Desktop

Updated by Luka Koczorowski

It is common to see repetitive tasks as self contained bots that are called upon by other bots. These helper bots can load configuration settings, log error messages, etc. 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:

  1. Main Flows (aka External Flows)
  2. Sub-Flows. Sub-flows are contained as children of external flows and are only accessible by their parent.
For a Flow to be reusable by other Flows, it must be an External Flow (Main 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

After generating Rules, reuse opportunities will be listed in the Reuse tab:

A user then has the following two options

Map to New External Flow

This is the most common option selected by users. All a user has to do is enable the Rule and click save. After that, the first export will create an External Flow and then update the rule with the flow's ID and Name. Then for every subsequent export this new flow will be mapped.

Map to Existing External Flow

On some occasions a reuse opportunity was exported before a Rule was created. In this case a user can manually enter the ID and name of the external flow to map to using the ID and Name columns in the dashboard.

Using 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

If mapping to an existing flow and include the following:

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

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