On using Microsoft Flow as a pre-ETL step for Power BI

Photo by WeRoad on Unsplash

A topic I’ve presented a few times to an Power BI crew is the concept that Microsoft Flow makes a great pre-ETL step for Power BI.

I talked to many attendees at Difinity Power BI Conference Auckland about this. It’s probably a time to write this up to summarize my thoughts.

There’s just something nice about having a product called Flow gathering data into your lakes.

Power BI

Power BI - Power Query and DAX is extremely good at crunching numbers.

Flow has variables, branching and loop logic, but they are slow for number crunching. Loop limitations like 5k rows or total number of action steps are also very limiting.

Don’t use Flow to crunch numbers.

Flow

Power BI connects to about 70 sources - Flow connects to about 250 connections.

Flow’s HTTP action and Custom Connector framework is better at gathering data. Automatic paging, more authentication options, retry policy, async HTTP request.

Flow can gather data on Trigger, copy them all to a simple location (e.g. SharePoint library or Azure Blog Storage) for Power BI to start refresh. So data processing can be done in a secure way.

Flow can call Power BI API to start a refresh. Turning the ETL into a trigger-push system. We get the best of both worlds - Flow to gather data, and Power BI to crunch them.

Power BI Scheduled Refresh with Flow

1. Schedule Refresh requires Flow to call Power BI API with a HTTP Request. But until very recently – this requires a delegate permission (so Flow has to call Power BI as a user) to perform delegate permission call requires a Custom Connector – which is what this blog post from Konstantinos goes into detail about creating.
   
   https://medium.com/@Konstantinos_Ioannou/refresh-powerbi-dataset-with-microsoft-flow-73836c727c33
   
   

2. In February, Power BI has started releasing application permission to call Power BI API – this work is still in preview and requires quite a lot of set up, it also requires the administrator to approve the permission. App-only read/write everything is a pretty high level permission, non-admin can't grant this.
   
   https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/use-power-bi-api-with-service-principal-preview/
   
   pros: easier to call with Service Identity, and HTTP request
   cons: may be impossible to get your admin to approve a new AAD APP permission
   

3. The April roadmap says Refresh is an action coming to Flow’s Power BI Connector – this will use delegate permissions and would be much simpler to use. So my thinking is that wait for this to drop after April
   
   https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/April19/microsoft-flow/improved-power-bi-connector

#FlowNinja hack 78 - modifying Modified By and Modified time with Microsoft Flow

In this quick blog post - we talk about how we can tweak the “Modified By” user field and “Modified” datetime field in SharePoint list and document libraries using Microsoft Flow.

This technique follows the very detailed article by MVP Andrew Koltyakov on LinkedIn - he describes how to call it with C#, JSOM and REST. He also has detailed examples of every possible field and what format you’ll need to run this with.

I’m calling it with Flow. So to see the full explanation you’ll have to read Andrew’s article ;-)

Also, before you read any further - please repeat the title of the blog post loudly, really fast 3 times.

Plan

• Requirements - why do we want this?

• Call ValidateUpdateListItem method with Flow

Requirements - why do we want this?

• You have updated a list item - you don’t really want the items to all say “Updated by System Account”.

• You’ve copied a bunch of files but you don’t want it to all say “Modified (now)”.

• You want to modify the item but you don’t want to create a new version.

• You uploaded a file but you don’t want to have two versions when you tweak the metadata.

• You wanted the update to tell you if the validation fails some SharePoint list item rule (this method will return a validation array object)

I need this. You also need this.

I don’t think we need to explain why you really really need this.

Flow

Here we have an item - modified a few seconds ago by me.

View fullsize

We want to update two values - the Modified By and the Modified (date time) fields.

Note the User is a JSON object that needs to be serialized by string() inside another JSON object.

The modified date is a date value, formatted to the “g” format. This format is usually MM/dd/yyyy HH:MM AA in EN locales. It is DIFFERENT if your environment has different locales. You can use “g” as date time string format to get the correct one for your locale.

Updates: 2020-06

Instead of “g”, we can also use 'yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss' which seems to work for all locales. More reading on this issue.

Also, Mikael pointed out we should use bNewDocumentUpdate: true to avoid creating a new version.

View fullsize

Here is when it runs. Notice the Editor field is escaped JSON string.

View fullsize

Result

The modified date is now Feb 18, 2018!

And the user is someone else - my minion Gandalf.

View fullsize

Extra Date Time Note

Here is an example of using addDays(utcNow(), -365, ‘g’)
So this date is a year before right now, with the ‘g’ date formatting string.

Resources

• This blog post was #FlowNinja hack 78 https://twitter.com/johnnliu/status/1097445738483576833

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/jj171078(v=office.15)

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/base-types/standard-date-and-time-format-strings

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.