Power Automate - Dataverse Actions - Return Full Metadata

Intro

Hey gang - recently Microsoft released a new parameter on the Dataverse connector in Power Automate. Check out the official documentation here.

The parameter is "Return Full Metadata". What this does is provide the option to include or exclude the OData attributes returned in the payload coming back from Dataverse.

Why should I care?

You might be asking yourself, "Why should I care?". The answer is this: if you use any of the OData attributes in your flow (the most common example I see is the @odata.id attribute for setting lookup type fields when creating or updating records), you must set the Return Full Metadata parameter to "Yes" in order to make that attribute available for use. If this attribute is set to "No", it won't be available for use.

Wrap-Up

Limiting the size of payloads and query results will always make things more efficient which is likely why this was implemented. It provides the person configuring the flow to determine if they want these particular attributes returned in the payload, if they have no need for them, then they can set the parameter to "No".

Be conscious of your Power Automate flow configuration moving forward to ensure you don't run into any hiccups involving OData metadata unexpectedly!