While InRule’s integration with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform hasn’t quite reached the notoriety of a customized DeLorean, it continues to expand a functional reach that is intrinsically enabled by these underlying platforms. With the various platform components working seamlessly together – InRule, Dynamics, Dataverse, Power Automate, etc., it surfaces many opportunities for an “I didn’t know it could do that” type of discovery.
A “stellar” example of this (excuse the shameless theme plug) is the ease in which the out-of-the-box InRule for Dynamics 365 solution can be called from Power Automate. This immediately extends an InRule decision process that was configured as either event-driven or on-demand in Dynamics to leverage all of the orchestration, scheduling, and connector capabilities of Power Automate.
For example, the below InRule Decision – ValidateAccount is configured to the ‘Run Rules’ button for the Account entity:
In doing so, the same decision is equally accessible to Power Automate via the magic of the Dataverse (formerly Common Data Service) and now can be called via a Power Automate Flow. This enables exposing the decision as a custom API, performing data enrichment, processing output from the rules, and so on…sky’s the limit.
But why stop there? Now that we can call the decision from a Flow, let’s create a scheduled batch process calling the same decision for multiple Accounts and email a report of the results.
Even with my (at times) skeptical view of overpromising/under-delivering technology, I am constantly impressed with how well the Power Platform components work together and advance on an almost daily basis. But I still had a nagging question, is Power Automate truly ready for prime time batch processing?
My personal assessment is – YES, the combination of InRule’s independently scalable decision services called from Power Automate’s Apply-Each parallel processing capability presents both incredibly powerful, yet simplistic batch management potential. It’s almost gamified, the act of tweaking the Power Automate concurrency settings along with scaling the App Services to find the optimal throughput sweet spot. I mean, how much fun is that!
While I realize not everyone equates batch processing with the latest in sci-fi worthy advances, I find that some of the more compelling breakthroughs are when the old “hard to solve” problems are now achieved in an elegant simplified manner. If you’re still curious to learn more, please head on over to the InRule White Paper, Better Business Apps with InRule®, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.
Thanks for reading!
