Send mail as anyone - #MicrosoftGraph and #MicrosoftFlow (bonus: inline image attachments)

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Sometimes while browsing MS Graph permissions, you come across something like this:

This is an Application Permission, it says "Send mail as any user"
The correct next step is of course we drop whatever we've been working on and immediately play with this.

Plan

  • Explore what is Send mail as any user
  • Do attachments
  • Do inline attachments

First, while still in the Azure Portal - grant this permission to the current service app.

Next, we head over to Microsoft Graph Explorer and grab a sample of the Exchange SendMail 

sendMail is usually on: /v1.0/me/sendMail for delegate permissions, but since we are testing sending email as another user, I replaced the URL to:

/v1.0/users/{user-id-guid}/sendMail

This is really as simple as it looks.

Gandalf is now asking me to try the new cafeteria.

What can you do with this?  Lots of people ask the Flow team how they can send email on behalf of the current user onto their managers.  This will do it easily, without having to worry about delegate permissions.

Extra notes: the service app does not have permission to read the user's inbox or login as that user.

And if it's so easy to send emails via MS Graph, let's try attachments.

Do Attachment

We add the JSON for attachments.  For this we need the $content-type and $content

flow-sendmail-json-attachment.jpg

Result:

 

Now, do inline attachments

Why do we do inline attachments?  There are few options to embed images as part of your rich HTML email.  You can use background image via CSS - this is mostly ignored by everybody.  You can use inline img with dataUri - this pretty much only works in iOS.

The oldest way and still the most supported way is to do inline attachment.  The trick is that your attachment must have an additional content-id (cid:) header with a unique name.  Then the HTML mail body can refer to that image wtih <img src="cid:xxxyyy" />

I left the original attachment as a comparison.  See the second attachment is marked inline and has a contentId - boromir12345.  The contentId is used in the HTML content as a embed reference: cid:boromir12345

Result:

Summary

MSGraph lets you send email as anyone.  
It also gives you much better controls over attachments and inline images.  

Please watch the recent MS-Flow Webinar I did with MS-Flow team focused on working with Binary Data.  That will explain how I take binary values and split them into $content and $content-type.

 

Setting up MSGraph Webhook with HTTP Action in MicrosoftFlow

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I've tweeted out several small tidbits of using Microsoft Flow's HTTP action to call the Microsoft Graph.

Hundreds of Graph APIs, dozens of Graph webhooks, one HTTP Action.

This little action continues to amaze me, so I'm putting several examples into this one blog post.

Four Techniques, One Action

  • Connect to Microsoft Graph with ONE HTTP Action 
  • Setting up Microsoft Graph Webhook Subscription
  • Paging
  • Retry Policy

One HTTP Action 

When we set Authentication to "Active Directory OAuth" - we can specify the Client ID / Client Secret in one HTTP action - so we don't need to make two separate calls first to Authenticate and get an access token, then call the flow we want and add the bearer header token.

This one action does it and asks no questions.

  • Tenant, Client ID and Client Secret are 3 strings. 
  • Authority should be set to https://login.microsoftonline.com/
  • Audience (resource) should be set to https://graph.microsoft.com

So yep, it's now easier to call any Microsoft Graph API from Flow than C#, PowerShell or JavaScript.

I'm in love with this, because this is way too amazing.

 

Note - this calls Flow via an App-Only Client ID.  If you are looking for delegate calls, you'll need to set up a Custom Connection swagger file.  Follow @skillriver https://gotoguy.blog/2017/12/17/access-microsoft-graph-api-using-custom-connector-in-powerapps-and-flows/

 

Microsoft Graph Webhook - a dozen new triggers

To set up webhook, we need to set up two Flows.  The First one is the subscriber.

The subscriber should be set up with a recurring 3 day schedule.

The notificationUrl is the HTTP Trigger URL of the second Flow.   

The expiry is 4229 minutes into the future from right now.  The maximum value is 4230 minutes.  If you go over the subscription call will fail.

On success, the subscription is set up and we are now listening to changes in our tenant's groups.

The Second one is the listener.

The listener needs to handle the validationToken that Microsoft Flow will call to test if your webservice follows the specs.

Read the trigger query string to pull out the validationToken.  if the value exists - then this is a set up call.  Respond immediately with text/plain 200 text.

Otherwise, we have a real call.  This is an event where our resource (in my case, I'm listening to Unified Groups being created and modified in my tenant) tells us something is happening. 

I call another Flow to start dealing with the change.  The other Flow does not return a response.  So the HTTP action can happen quickly as a trigger, and I can return 202 accept response to Microsoft Graph quickly.

 

This is the message sent from Microsoft Graph to Flow to tell me I've got a new Group created in my tenant.

Episode III in my blog series on Group Management with Flow will cover the webhook in more detail, combining it with a delta query and figuring out what changed.

 

Pagination

It turns out HTTP Pagination is baked in too.

To set this up - first set a $top in the Microsoft Graph call to artificially limit the number of rows returned.

This will also return a $nextLink

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/concepts/paging

Flip to the Settings for the HTTP action by clicking on ...
This lets you turn on Pagination and it will accept up to 5000 items.

The result is that the HTTP action will follow next page links automatically, and return you the entire array of the paged data concatenated together.

Magic.  Still one action.

Retry Policy

When calling HTTP (or other ApiConnections, like SharePoint) the default policy of retry 4 times exponentially means that if your action is going to fail, it will fail four times.

When building a Flow and you want it to fail fast - set the Retry Policy to None.

This is useful for calling AzureFunctions as well.  AzureFunction through host.json lets us control de-queuing speed and concurrency, but that requires you to use a Queue trigger.  When we use HTTP action from Flow - we control the retry / ease off policy through this setting.  In this use case, Flow is the orchestrater.

 

Summary

Calling Microsoft Graph directly with as simple as 1 HTTP request action means that a lot of slightly-more complex task of authenticating, then getting an access token, then calling MSGraph with bearer header becomes a whole lot easier.

And as steps get simpler, we can do a whole lot more.

 

 

Office 365 Groups Management As A Service: Episode II: Know your groups with Flow, MSGraph

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This is the second post on building a group management tool with Flow and MSGraph.  In this post we talk about how to get a list of all your groups and copy them to a list in SharePoint so you can do more fancy things with them.

Episode I: Create Groups

Plan

  • Call MSGraph with Flow to get a list of all your Office 365 Groups
  • Create a SharePoint list to store them
  • Create/Update SharePoint list items
    (these steps above are good enough, the steps below are bonus points)
     
  • Delta Query
  • More Details
  • Parallel Execution
  • [NEW] Paging (if you have more than 100 groups) - suggestion to this post by @mikaelsvenson

MSGraph to List Groups

Some of you may have seem my love letter tweet.

  • MS Graph endpoint is https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups - docs 
  • Authority is https://login.microsoftonline.com/
  • Audience is Resource: https://graph.microsoft.com
  • Tenant ID, Client ID and Client Secret you'll need to register an App-Only credential app to get these.  Grant that App permission to Read Groups

 

Create a SharePoint List to store them

Complete the Flow to store Groups to SharePoint

This picture is complex, because it has a lot of tricky parts that's mostly caused by the way Flow's Editor works.  Flow's editor will try to filter the variables available to you by type, the Parse JSON action will parse JSON into a strongly type object following a strict schema.  This lets your subsequent actions work well.

BUT when your action returns null then suddenly the Parse JSON action can fail.  You'll then need to go back to the schema, and change some of the error "types" to "any".  You also may need to remove some of the fields from "required"

A few tweaks to the Parse JSON:

These tweaks are necessary because Parse JSON will fail if one of your groups don't have a createDateTime, classification or displayName.  You need to run this on your environment and check whether the fields need to be required or tweaked.

 

Paging

 

 

 

Delta Query

Because MS Graph supports Delta Queries - we can call the Graph with a Delta Query link, essentially, each time we call it, it'll return a nextLink (or a deltaLink).  So we just remember that, and use it the next time we want to call MS Graph again, and it will tell us just the differences.

See the delta query picked up one new Group I created for testing.

With a delta query - you can reliably set the Flow to run several times a day, and it will only send new/updated Groups back into the SharePoint list.

 

 

More Group Details

Sometimes you want more information on that group.  You can call Get group (on Azure AD connector) to get more information on the group.

Parallel 

We can configure the foreach action in Flow to run in parallel with 20 concurrency.  You'll need to add this to the definition JSON.

parallel.png
"runtimeConfiguration": { "concurrency": { "repetitions": 20 } }
flow-parallel.png

See the task of writing 19 Office 365 groups to sharepoint list was done in 4 seconds.

Result

 

[New] Paging

This section is added as @mikaelsvenson pointed out that I wasn't handling paging for groups.  Mikael also told me to use $top so I don't have to create a few hundred groups for testing.

Always listen to Mikael.

But I don't want to do loops - I've seen a pagination control, I want to know what that does.

 

Go to the settings for HTTP action and the first one is Pagination.
Turn that on, and set the limit to 5000.

  • Pagination controls seems to merge the results of multiple requests into one value array.  This is good.
  • Pagination controls works on Delta query - this is also good.
  • Pagination results does not return the deltaLink for next Delta query.  This is not so good.  So if we are planning to merge both Pagination and Delta Query we'll need to may be make two calls.

Notes

  • Use HTTP with Azure AD Auth to get all my groups in one call
  • Save that to SharePoint
  • Deal with Delta Queries with Flow
  • Configure Parallel execution in Flow so we can do this super fast.  This isn't code that runs one group at a time...  why would we do that when we can hit 20 at a time :-) 

 

 

Difference between beta, edu and v1.0 of MSGraph #microblog

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I find this interesting - source: digging around MicrosoftTeams powershell and Mikael Svenson's blog post on enabling Teams programmatically. 

What's funny, because what I found strange is when Mikael says this:

The creation of the group itself happens against the /edu/groups which I’ve never seen before, but that’s not interesting.

Because that's the bit I found totally interesting.  Why does the PowerShell need the /edu/ endpoint?
Hop over to Graph Explorer we can play with this:

msgraph-edu.png

 

Comparing different endpoint: v1.0

endpoint: beta

endpoint: edu

It becomes clear why we need the /edu/ endpoint.  It has this bit of information:

"creationOptions": [
    "SkypeSpaces",
    "ExchangeProvisioningFlags:481"
],

The hint that a Team is provisioned seems to be the flag "SkypeSpaces"

Interesting.

Naturally, one would ask.  So if I want to enable Yammer, Planner or PowerBI on an existing Unified Group.  Do I POST an update to creationOptions?

Very.  Interesting.

I'm speaking about Serverless Flow and Azure Functions at Collab365 Free Online Conference

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collab365-watch-my-session.jpg

Have you heard about the virtual Collab365 Global Conference 2017 that’s streaming online November 1st – 2nd?

Join me and 120 other speakers from around the world who will be bringing you the very latest content around SharePoint, Office 365, Flow, PowerApps, Azure, OneDrive for Business and of course the increasingly popular Microsoft Teams. The event is produced by the Collab365 Community and is entirely free to attend.

Places are limited to 5000 so be quick and register now.

During the conference I'd love you to watch my session which is called : 

'Serverless with Microsoft Flow and Azure Functions'

Level up your mastery of Microsoft Flow. Switch to Azure Functions only when you need to. No doubt there will be many sessions on Microsoft Flow, introducing you to its wonderful merits and rough edges. This session is for the advanced users - we will see what Microsoft Flow really is, and bend it to our will.

If you join me, you will learn:

  • Master JSON in a Flow
  • Combining Azure Functions with Flow
  • Failure Recovery, in a Flow
  • How to handle Binary in a Flow
  • How to write HTML and generate PDF in Flow

Topic(s):

  • Azure Functions
  • Microsoft Flow

Audience :

  • Developer
  • Power User

Time :

  • Thursday, November 2 2017 10:00 AM (UTC)
  • Thursday, November 2 2017 09:00 PM (ADST)

How to attend :

  1. Register here.
  2. At the time listed above go here to watch my session. (you can also add me to your own personal planner from the agenda.
  3. Enjoy the demos and ask me questions, I'll put the templates up for download after the session.