Extending Employee Ideas in Dataverse for Teams using Azure DevOps and Power Automate

I installed the Employee Ideas template on my Microsoft Dataverse for Teams environment.

It's a cool sample app which allows employees to submit ideas and save them to a table in the Dataverse.

But wouldn't it be better if after being saved in the Dataverse the ideas became work items in Azure DevOps? Hell yeah, it would!

Rob Boyers, a colleague of mine had this very idea, so I helped him put it into action, and I expanded on it a bit.

Here's what I did -

Create the work Item as a User Story in Azure DevOps
Attach the responses to the rating questions to the work item as discussion comments in Azure DevOps
Upload the attached files and associate them to the work item in Azure DevOps

This article and the broadcast below explains the first part - creating the work item in Azure DevOps.

We use Power Automate for each of these actions.

First, look at where the app saves ideas. They're in the Employee Ideas table in the Dataverse.

So, our trigger, using the Common Data Service (Current Environment Connector) will be on the creation of an employee idea. It looks like this -

Next, we use the Azure DevOps connector and select the Create a Work Item Action. We'll create a user story and populate the Title and Description from the values in the trigger response.

Then, finally, we update the employee idea with the URL and ID of the work item we created.

So, nothing too fancy in this part, but the next part, where we add the discussion comments gets a little bit more complicated.