Power Automate: Get Common Data Service Files related to an Entity

Why?

Ever since the December 2019 announcement on improvements to data storage in Common Data Service announcing the File and Image data type, I have been waiting for it to be fully functional. As these improvements yet have to allow more than one attachment per added Field, I am still using the traditional relationshop to the Note (Annotation) entity for storing (multiple) attachments on one Entity and sometimes you want to get all those related files in a Power Automate Flow 😎

What?

This post will show you how to setup an Entity to make use of the traditional attachment functionality within the Common Data Service (CDS) and then let a Power Automate Flow get those attachments related to an Entity record.

How?

1) The first thing is to create an entity that has attachments enabled:

This creates a one-to-many-relationship (1:n) of your entity with a very special Entity in the CDS named Notes also known as Annotations. You can verify this by looking at the Relationships tab of your entity:

TIP: from the Relationships tab you can click in a related Entity to go directly to the configuration page of that Entity 💡.

2) When we realize that this default functionality to handle attachments of a CDS record is setup as a 1:n relationship, we know we can list all related records using the List records action of the CDS Connector. We just have to use the Notes for the Entity name and use a filter query on the _objectid_value property of this Entity:

Formula for the Filter Query:

_objectid_value eq @{triggerOutputs()?['body/crcef_djinvoiceid']}

Now when the Flow runs on a record with multiple attachments:

it gets all related files:

Next post will show on how to use the attachments listed in the Flow 💪