Resolve token expiration issue with S123 and Power Automate

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Summary

The Survey123 connection within Power Automate expires every 2 weeks, and needs to be "refreshed."

Findings/Supporting Info

This is a known issue as of June 2023, and has been acknowledged by Esri. In November 2023, a more formal issue was created, and in Feb 2024 (see comments in same forum thread), Esri communicated a plan to address the issue by Summer 2024, by incorporating the Survey123 connector functionality into the broader ArcGIS connector toolkit within Power Automate. Unclear if this has occurred.

Next Steps

Determine whether the Esri fix was implemented already.

• If YES, then migrate the Power Automate Flow to use the improved functionality.
• If NO, find a timeline and implement a short-term fix.
  • Short-term fix: create a reminder, and manually refresh the token every 14 days

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Pinged Esri to check on status update

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Temporary fix:

Manually refresh the Survey123 Connector in Power Automate, every Monday.

Issue with the temporary fix:

Flows can be shared, but Connectors apparently can not. This means that only I can access the Connector to refresh it.

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Update on Temp Fix:

Met with MS engineering team yesterday to try to troubleshoot ability to share a Power Automate Connector.

• Forum posts suggest that a user with Environment Admin or Environment Maker permissions can share Connectors with other users. Ella has permissions at one of these levels, but was also unable to share Connectors.
  • As I'm writing this, I'm realizing that she was attempting to share a Connector associated with her primary MS account, which may trigger additional restrictions. May be worth trying to have her setup a Survey123 Connector, and see if she can share that?
• Frank shared this resource which discusses setting up a connection reference in Power Automate, which is vaguely analogous to a view of a Connector, which allows flows to accept the reference instead, letting a flow creator update the underlying Connector, and having those updates affect each relevant flow
  • We set this up together using the Survey123 Connection checker flow. Seemed promising, but still no clear way to share the connection reference with others.
  • Notable that if a user is able to see the connection reference, then they can apparently point it at a new connection. This means that if we can solve for the problem of sharing connection references, we could implement the following pattern:
    • User 1 creates the flow and connection references, and owns the underlying connector
    • User 2 owns their own copy of the connector. Uses the same service account credentials, but is technically a different connector than the one owned by User 1
    • When the token needs to be refreshed, User 2 can access the properties of the connection reference, and can point it to the connector owned by User 2.
    • When the token needs to be refreshed again, User 1 can access the properties of the connection reference, and can point it back to the original connector owned by User 1.

Next Steps:

MS Engineering:

Ella, Frank, and Eliezer were going to do some research into sharing connection references between users, and notify us of any results.

GIS Team

Jack and Casey will test to see if Casey is able to view the connection references within the recently created solution.

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Recently discovered that the ArcGIS Power Automate connector apparently has all of the blocks required to fully replace the use of the Survey123 connector. The blocks also appear to be a 1:1 replacement, so while testing still needs to be performed, it shouldn't be a big lift to swap over the production automation. According to forum posts, the token expiration issue doesn't exist for the ArcGIS connector