In this latest post as part of my wider series and category on architecting solutions for the Power Platform, we’ll look at the high level to managing configuration and reference data for ALM when it comes to implementing solutions on the Power Platform. We’ll look at some of the options here and a solution architects role in owning this.
Recap on ALM…
Configuration and reference data
So friends, when we talk about configuration or reference data we’re talking about configuration settings or lookup data for example which determines how a solution behaves but isn’t solution aware so doesn’t get moved when doing solution exports and imports. We have to manage this data slightly differently…
Let’s look at some of the options!
Environment variables
So environment variables are a first simple method of letting us set dynamic data values within the components we’ve developed on the Power Platform that support ALM and changing values between environment to prevent hard coded values in custom logic. Check out some of my content on using environment variables below…
Connection references
Connection references are used for connections that are relevant to a specific environment or for objects that utilise the connector that need to be solution aware.
Connection references allow us to move our objects between environments and swap out the connections being utilised when we get to our target environment.
Configuration migration tool
Now this is the big one friends! Solutions do not hold configuration data as we already mentioned, so we need another way of handling this movement. Using the configuration migration tool we can move Dataverse data between environments for configuration for our solutions.
We can also use Azure DevOps steps to automate this configuration migration. Check out the posts below…