Difinity Conference 2019 Auckland - Hackathon Workshop, Flow and PowerApps

I’ll be presenting at Difinity Conference 2019 Auckland on several presentations.

Difinity is the largest Microsoft Data Platform conference in New Zealand. I’ll be presenting two talks - one on Microsoft Flow and one on PowerApps.

Pre-Conf Hackathon/Workshop: Master your inner Flow and PowerApps

This is a whole day workshop covering PowerApps and Microsoft Flow at a beginner to intermediate level, for the Difinity conference - the exercises are tuned for PowerBI integration.

http://difinity.co.nz/pre-conference-workshops-difinity-2019/#CustomConnector

Introduction to PowerApps and Power BI

This session is about two things – it is firstly a thorough introduction about PowerApps, where it came from and where is it going.

And it is also about how the sum is more than the individual parts – when we combine PowerApps and Power BI we can build some truly amazing more interactive reports & dashboards.

How to make everything with Microsoft Flow (advanced)

This is a intermediate-advance level Microsoft Flow session that looks at the very different types of Flow automations that we can do. Whether it is personal automation, enterprise workflows, or developer webservices. Flow is that flexible tool.

Chat!

Those that have met me will know I’m a very chatty person!

I’ll be hanging out at the community booths, so come find me, or tweet me and ask your Flow, PowerApps (or SharePoint) questions!

MS Ignite the Tour 2019 Sydney - MS Flow x2

I’ll be presenting at Microsoft Ignite the Tour 2019, Sydney on two Microsoft Flow presentations.

Advancing the Flow - understand expressions in Microsoft Flow

Is a short 15 minute theatre session on expressions. In a short 15 minutes I’d like to cover why you might want to use expressions, and how it opens the entire Flow engine to your command.

Flow for Developers - insane low-code Serverless automation

This is a full hour breakout session where I wanted to talk about what we can do with Flow, at the intermediate to advanced end and the power it opens up to every platform it touches. Whether it is SharePoint Online, Dynamics CRM, PowerApps or Power BI, from Microsoft 365 to Dynamics 365 to Azure. We have 250+ connectors and it is completely bananas for developer productivity.

Chat!

Those that have met me will know I’m a very chatty person!

I’ll be hanging out at the community booths or at the SharePoint Gurus + Valo booth, so come find me, or tweet me and ask your Flow (or SharePoint) questions!

I hope team Office give Delve a second chance

Photo by Jay Wennington on Unsplash

Office Delve was the first product to use the Office Graph – an attempt to surface the nodes and edges of documents and people to build some intelligence.

Office Graph became Microsoft Graph and found lots of developer love.

Delve had to choose how to continue to exist – I suspect the team looked at the usage of how people that actually used Delve and studied how they used Delve.

Disclaimer

Please note - I have no particular inside knowledge of what Team Office is working on regarding Delve. I just wanted to write this, in 2019, because a good friend asked me - hey do you use Delve, do you like it? I am also NOT implying team Office is cutting Delve - as far as I know, they are maintaining it as it currently is. In fact, if I had known what they are working on - I wouldn’t have been able to write this post.

I do know from SharePoint uservoice - that there seems to be some work happening on taxonomy and metadata. So I figure I should write this blog post now.

So how does Delve work?

So a few years ago, I suspect they settled on what they thought was the killer idea – Delve shows you “people around you” and “documents around you” 

They found that if they could show YOU the documents that PEOPLE AROUND YOU are working on – that must be documents you want to see.

Today, that’s pretty much the only scenario that Delve works really well for - if I am looking for the document that I know my colleague was working on last Friday but I don’t know where it was saved.  Delve will tell me.

There was a second feature of delve - Boards and favourites. But as the product evolved around how it is being used - the boards idea takes a dramatic backseat.

How I think Delve should have worked

it should have been the cross Office 365 #tags management system, powered by Search and Graph. Providing a one-stop definition for folksonomy and taxonomy as both a destination, but also the interface where a process librarian owns and curates their tag collection.

 

There was a secondary idea – Delve gave us “Boards” where people can add documents to a board – think Pinterest, but for documents, and people, and office objects. 

So now imagine #usergroup tag shows you emails, documents and people involved with running the monthly company usergroup.

That’s damn useful. Surface it in SPFx search webpart. Use it to show a most recently added documents list or appear in a mega menu. 

What I think what team Office should have built, is to improve and combine

• Improve Delve Boards and combine

• SP Document Metadata taxonomy tags

• SP Folksonomy tags

• Yammer hashtags

• Teams hashtags

• Exchange/Outlook hashtags and categories

• Tags across Todo, Planner

• Tags across Stream

This way – we can surface a collection of documents explicitly labelled with tags – across the entire company. 

Say, if you tag #induction and this article will automatically appear in an #induction board in Delve.  That would have been more magical. 

Or if an OHS #worksafety email was sent and tagged - it would appear in the Delve Board. 

Appoint specific users to own the boards – so they are the tag librarian making sure unsuitable links is hidden from that tag. They own the boards - so they are the curators. They can decide if objects are automatically included, how the objects are sorted, and which objects should be pinned to the top.

I think this isn’t a simple goal - this is the longer path – requiring Team Office to work on some sort of inter-office tag/hashtag/metadata system.   I don’t believe it is possible to implement this across every product and force everyone to use the same list - but I do believe it is possible to aggregate them at the Search results stage and control collections via Delve Boards.

I think it would give Delve a strong reason and a decent second chance at being a unique Office 365 go to destination.  And tie up a lot of loose ends at the same time.

It’s 2019, my hope with Delve Next

is that we will see Me, then Tags (then People) - and the tags are curated boards of content collected across all of Office 365 via every tag and hashtag system we have.

How to implement Sort with Microsoft Flow in 3 actions within a loop

Photo by Sophie Elvis on Unsplash

For some reason, Flow (and LogicApps) doesn’t have a built in sort() method.

So after much nudging from Paul Culmsee, I brooded about this and sat down and built one. There’s three actions within a loop, packing quite a lot of tricks, this is how it all works.

Plan

How does it work conceptually?

Build your own Sort in Microsoft Flow

Simplify it to 3 actions within a loop

Extend it to sort objects and beyond.

Defining what we need

Let’s set up some input and outputs - we want to have our initial variable within the variable “initial-array” and we want to have our final sorted result within the variable “sorted-array”

We want to do a simple insertion sort - for the academic - this is an O(n^2) sort. Not the fastest, but simple enough to understand and express with logic expressions.

How does it work conceptually?

For each element in the initial-array, we will loop add it to a final ‘sorted-array’ in a sorted position.

In the first loop, the sorted array would be empty - but as we progress, for each new value we are considering - we would split the sorted-array into two sets of sub-arrays, ones that are smaller than the current value, and ones that are larger than the current value.

Finally, we combine everything back together in a union, set that to be the new “sorted-array” value, and proceed with the next element in the initial-array.

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Build your own Sort in Microsoft Flow

So extending our Flow - add a loop over the initial-array.

Within the loop, we want to put the current item into a compose action. (going with the example above, this would be the element ‘4’ )

Add a compose at the end to see the final output of sorted-array.

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Cutting sorted-array into lesser half, greater half

We do this in a parallel branch - these two don’t affect each other - add two Filter Array

Left, set the item() of the sorted-array to be <= the current value of the initial-array
Right, set the item() of the sorted-array to be > the current value of the initial-array

Union the arrays together. That is, the left-array, the right array, and in the middle, the current value, but put that inside an array of 1 element with createArray( <current-value> )

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Before the apply to each ends, write the union result back into the “sorted-array” that concludes this loop, getting us ready for the next value.

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See how it runs:

The result is a sorted-array.

See for example, loop 6, when the value is ‘4’

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Clean up and simplify

We can remove some of the blocks to make the sort ‘smaller’

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The final result

3 actions within one loop

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Sorting complex (JSON) Objects

It is best to build an sort-array like this with numbers to understand how it works, before attempting to tweak it to sort complex object arrays.

Say for example - if we want to sort by the Date of a complex object array (our scenario was an RSS feed) - within the apply to each, we want to isolate the property we want to compare.

Because the current item’s property is used several times - we add the top compose back into the apply to each loop, we can consider the Compose is a kind of temporary variable used to hold the value that we are using to compare with.

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We need to compare against the date in the two Filter-Arrays, but we don’t actually use it for the final Union - because we want to union the arrays together, not union the dates together.

And that’s Sort. Complex explanations, but very elegant with 3 actions inside a loop.

Hot-patching our dependencies with patch-package

This is also a quick blog post.

Let me tell you the tale of patch-package. Not many people have heard the tale of patch-package. Many prefer to walk the path forked.

Well, the path of patch-package works like this.

About patch-package

Your favourite NPM library has a problem. You need to hot fix it. You send in a PR and it’s stuck in review hell. The poor maintainer is on stress leave and you really don’t want to trouble her/him - they are in Finland, don’t wear shoes, and can’t possibly scale any further.

This is the patch-package path https://www.npmjs.com/package/patch-package

1. yarn / npm lock the dependency on that specific version so our entire team and the build pipeline gets the same version

2. npm install patch-package --save-dev

3. make changes in node_modules against that library, e.g. “package-banana”

4. npx patch-package “package-banana” - this creates a folder
   /patches/package-banana-version.patch

5. add “postinstall": "patch-package" to scripts section in package.json

6. check in / commit everything. Package.json and /patches/package-banana-*.patch

Now when anyone get latest and run npm install, the build chain will automatically grab that version of the library package-banana and apply your patch.

Then it will build as normal. This works great on Azure DevOps (VSTS) too.

When the library package-banana is finally fixed - update the library version and the patch file won’t work against newer versions.