Power Automate: Embedded Connection error in child flows

Problem Statement

After creating a child flow and trying to save it, I was stumbled upon with an error in the Flow Checker which stated “Update the child flow for action to not use run-only user connections”

Reason

The reason for this is because child workflows support only embedded connections. Also there is no provision to retain the context of the user of the parent flow and transfer it to the child flow. In such a case, the user context is lost.

Since the connections don’t go from parent to child, we need to define the connection in the child flow itself.

Resolution

To embed the connection, lets head over to the child flow page and click on the edit option of Run Only Users

Each connection within the flow is by default defined to use the current user’s context which would be null as its not passed from the parent flow. So we will click on the drop down to select one of the connections that is predefined.

Click OK in the dialog box and click on Save for the changes to take effect.

Thus, we have used a predefined connection for the child flow to use while invoked from the parent flow.

Now if we go ahead and save the child flow, it will get saved without any issues.

Summary

Thus, we saw how to circumvent the common Embedded Connection issue while creating the child cloud flows.