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ELM Business Rules — Manual Authoring Guide

ELM ships three business rules that cannot be reliably created through the Dataverse Web API in this repository. The supported way to deploy them is to author them once in the Power Platform maker portal, then transport them via your managed solution.

If you want a machine-readable copy of the definitions, run:

python scripts/create_business_rules.py            # human-readable
python scripts/create_business_rules.py --format json

Rule 1 — ELM Zone Rationale Required

  • Entity: fsi_environmentrequest
  • Scope: Entity
  • Condition: fsi_zone equals Zone2 (100000002) OR fsi_zone equals Zone3 (100000003)
  • True branch action: Set Business Required → fsi_zonerationale → Business Required
  • False branch action: Set Business Required → fsi_zonerationale → Not Required

Rule 2 — ELM Security Group Required

  • Entity: fsi_environmentrequest
  • Scope: Entity
  • Condition: fsi_zone equals Zone2 (100000002) OR fsi_zone equals Zone3 (100000003)
  • True branch action: Set Business Required → fsi_securitygroupid → Business Required
  • False branch action: Set Business Required → fsi_securitygroupid → Not Required

Rule 3 — ELM Approval Comments Required

  • Entity: fsi_environmentrequest
  • Scope: Entity
  • Condition: fsi_state equals Rejected (100000005)
  • True branch action: Set Business Required → fsi_approvalcomments → Business Required
  • False branch action: Set Business Required → fsi_approvalcomments → Not Required

Authoring procedure

  1. Sign in to https://make.powerapps.com.
  2. Open Solutions and select the solution that contains your ELM tables (either the unmanaged developer solution or your shipping managed solution staging area).
  3. Click New → Automation → Business rule.
  4. In the picker, choose fsi_environmentrequest.
  5. In the rule designer, set Scope to Entity (so server-side validation runs, not just the form-side preview).
  6. Drag a Condition node onto the canvas and configure the condition exactly as documented above.
  7. Connect True and False branches to Set Business Required action nodes targeting the appropriate column.
  8. Save the rule, then Activate it.
  9. Repeat for all three rules.

After authoring, optionally export the solution to capture the generated WF Foundation XAML if you want to track the rules under source control.

Why not deploy via Web API?

  • The XAML root for category=2 business rules in modern Dataverse is Windows Workflow Foundation (<Activity xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/netfx/2009/xaml/activities">), not the legacy <RuleDefinitions xmlns=".../crm/2009/WebServices"> format that earlier versions of create_business_rules.py produced.
  • Workflow rows must be created in Draft state (statecode=0/statuscode=1) and then PATCHed to Activated. The previous script attempted to create them already-Activated, which the platform rejects.
  • Reliably generating valid WF XAML programmatically is brittle. Using the maker portal lets the platform produce the correct XAML on save.