Release of Flow Studio: Deploy & future Price Increase

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We have released Flow Studio v0.1.91 “Flow Studio: Deploy”

This is a super productive feature that we’ve been working on for a while.

You can think of it as “Flow Migrate Wizard”.

There’s a YouTube video showing the feature.

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How Does it work?

• Select one or more of your existing Flows

• Enter a new name, or select an existing Flow to overwrite

• Configure text, URL or variable replacements if you need to create variations

• Run deploy Plan

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What are the use cases?

• Bulk create Flows from a template

• Keeping child copies of a Flow updated from a master version

• (Future) Migrate Flows between environments

• (Future) Migrate Flows between user accounts

• (Future) Migrate Flows into Solutions

Future Price Increase

Flow Studio currently is US$100 per year or US$10 per month. When Flow Studio: Deploy goes live (we are hoping in two or week’s time), we will be raising the price of Flow Studio to US$200 per year (or US$20 per month).

As a thank you to current subscribers - existing customers before the price increase will remain under current price.

So yes - if you have been thinking about purchasing Flow Studio in the past but needed a nudge, we are adding a great Deploy feature to go with that nudge.

We believe your time building Flows and keeping them up to date is far worth the price increase we are adding to the product.

As always. We couldn’t have done this without our fans.

Thank you for your support. Let us know what features you need.

Join us for a free full day Sydney Microsoft App in a Day - June 7

Join Microsoft MVPs John Liu and Paul Culmsee - two of Australia’s Power Platform MVPs in Microsoft’s App in a Day event on June 7 right here in Sydney. I’m running this in June with Paul’s Seven Sigma solutions.

Register today for an all-day interactive training to learn how to create custom business applications without writing code, leveraging the Microsoft Power Platform technologies - PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.

App in a Day is designed to accelerate your PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and CDS for Applications experience with a comprehensive training in a single day led by certified Microsoft Partners.

Bring your Windows-based notebook and we will supply the rest, including lunch! *

The training provides practical hands-on experience with Seven Sigma who specializes in creating PowerApps solutions in a full-day of instructor lead app creation workshop.

You will learn how to build custom apps that run on mobile devices, and share them inside your organization securely.

Space is very limited and there’s only two weeks to go - so you need to quickly talk to your colleagues and book at this link.

https://www.microsoftevents.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x67310360001&ch=x3

One Flow to handle them all - Part 2 figuring out the changes

I had previously wrote a method of using Microsoft Flow to subscribe to all the lists in a SharePoint site - and how to have them all call a second Request flow to execute on File changed in any of these lists.

http://johnliu.net/blog/2019/3/one-flow-to-handle-them-all-how-to-subscribe-to-multiple-sharepoint-lists-with-one-flow

In that blog post, as all good trilogies go - we finished at a spot where we have gotten a webhook event call, but did not proceed to continue working out which items actually changed.

The full Get Changes Method

In the long delay between my #FlowNinja tweet and the blog posts being written, my friend @ISSPDEV couldn’t wait for the next part he went ahead with this. He wrote in much detail.

https://gist.github.com/zplume/1baf04cc05927b57a5da248454b15dcc 

Implementing the best practices from the SharePoint team

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/apis/webhooks/get-started-webhooks

The Short Cut Method

I provide a second method, perhaps one that is much shorter for a Power User to implement. I worked on this with @ArtsyPowerApper and figured out a simpler method.

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First upload a file, then copy the entire trigger body JSON.

Next, after the validation steps we had in the initial handler flow - we add a Parse JSON.

Use the trigger body JSON to create the schema.

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By telling SharePoint to give us files updated in that library in the last 10 seconds, we fetch the changed items directly.

Thoughts

In my tests - I have tried 5 seconds and it seems good enough, but I extended it to 10 seconds in case there’s an large upload or delay.

Short cut method has a small risk of firing an event twice on the same item if it was somehow updated rapidly twice.

Also, unlike the complete Get Changes method, we can’t see System Update, Deletion, Rename, Permission Update events. So this method is only good for Item/File Created and Updated events.

But the steps is far simpler with a Parse JSON and one Get Files (with an OData filter)

Workarounds needed to use the Excel Connector in Microsoft Flow

There are two Excel Connectors in Microsoft Flow. There’s a quirk to work with them.

Plan

• Two Connectors

• How do we use them? What’s the problem we need this workaround for?

• Extra tips

Two Connectors

In Microsoft Flow, we now have two connectors for Excel. We have Excel Online (OneDrive) and Excel Online (Business).

There used to be a third Excel connector - which has been deprecated.

How do we use them?

The Excel Connectors call Microsoft Graph under the hood. We need to provide a folder to the file, the file itself, read tables from that file, and then get rows from a table in the Excel file.

To use these connectors, the Excel file must have the data that we want to read in a table.

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To use the Excel Online connectors with dynamic file name, we need to find the MSGraph ID of that file. It looks something crazy like:

01BUSAX432CKPX6HWHFJBI7CHAXKHKDHSS

So we build a carefully crafted Send HTTP Request to SharePoint, using the v2.0 endpoint to pull back the MSGraph ID for the selected file.

This then allows us to work with the Excel Online connector.

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To use List Rows Present in a Table - we need the Table ID, since this is dynamic now - I’m fetching this with Get Tables (need the file ID).

Then I use an expression to fetch the ID of the first table in the excel

first(body('Get_tables')?['value'])?['id']  

Extra Tips

By default, Excel Online connector retrieves 250 items. We can change the top query param to return 500 or 1000 items.

But to truly get back All the items, we need to switch on Flow’s pagination policy.

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See the result - my meteorite.xslx has 49998 rows.

Extra Tips 2

Excel Connector can only retrieve rows via a ‘table’. So if you have to read rows from an Excel file that doesn’t have a table, we can call the Excel Connector action “Create Table” to insert one, then read the rows with that.

This is originally Flow lifehack 96.

https://twitter.com/johnnliu/status/1129715544712597504

Flow Studio 1K users - time for a roadmap update

In the past week - total number of Flow Studio users crossed over 1000.

We have 1000 users!

We want to thank you, Flow makers, for your support. When you share a feature you loved, or suggest a feature that was missing or tell me a bug that we’ve never seen before.

We really enjoyed the journey, there is much we didn’t know when we started, but your support made sure we keep going on.

If you don’t know what John does - check out

https://flowstudio.app

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What’s next in Flow Studio?

It’s perhaps a good time to talk about what’s coming next on the Flow Studio roadmap.

We have been very busy.

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Flow Studio

Flow Studio’s key feature today is a better way to manage a maker’s own inventory of Flows, with a suite of tools to help a maker with making more successful flows.

Along the way, makers relied on:

• #hashtag grouping

• Sort by failed runs and last modified runs

• Run sparklines

• Edit JSON

• Runs with Context

• Bulk run resubmit

• Flow version history

• Full definition text search

• … just to list some of our favourite features.

Our next big roadmap milestone is a Flow deployment wizard

• Create a deployment plan to copy a template Flow, with variable, URL or connection replacements, to a set of destinations.
  Ideally, the target scenario is for 1 Flow to be copied to 50 SharePoint sites.

• Keep the deployment plan to perform future updates. Because deployment is never a one-off process.

• We will be able to copy between 1 to many sites

• Between multiple Flow environments

• And eventually, between different accounts - for user migration (and even tenants)

This work is progressing, you can support us right now by trying Flow Studio - and reach out and tell us what scenarios you need.

Get started with Flow Studio for free: https://flowstudio.app/

Flow Studio for IT

Flow Studio is designed for an individual maker, or even a consulting company creating Flows under a single account. It helps us manage the Flows in that one account.

It turns out, an inventory management tool for an individual maker and a fast way to see the runs immediately, is actually a scaled down version of what an IT management and governance portal needs.

IT wants to know what’s in every maker’s toolbox. What is running across the enterprise. What’s successful and keep them that way, and what’s not successful and needs to be mitigated.

Picture ourselves across the fog of war that is today’s IT - how many Flows are we able to see? Are they successful? If they aren’t successful, do we know? Are they business critical? If they are business critical but not successful… Is that a risk?

To begin to answer all these questions, we think we need to understand the landscape - let’s produce a Map. Is there a way we can get a bird’s eye view of the entire map of Flows across the entire company.

This is a picture of London underground.
The FLOWS IN YOUR ORG LOOKS LIKE THIS.

Our second roadmap milestone - is to create a governance dashboard.

We want to know

• All the Flows and the runs, are they successful, are they failing, when have they been last modified?

• All the Users - who are our Makers, what Flows do they do?

• All the Systems - what systems do they touch - not just SharePoint, which Site? Not just Exchange - which email account?

  • You can use SharePoint connectors. But you can’t use it on any site URL

  • You can use Exchange connectors. But you can’t use it on certain email addresses

• All the solutions - we understand

  • Flow solutions (managed and unmanaged)

  • Teams Flows

  • Personal Flows

  • Resource Owner Flows

  • We also understand if a maker is using Flow Studio tags.

• All the connectors

• Monitor, Alert Agents, Reports

• Bring the bulk editing tooling from Flow Studio and scale it to IT

We want to ensure

• All your business critical processes are automated and monitored

• Maintain Flow success - we want green ticks across the map

We are in the process of building this out with several partners that has expressed interest. Please do reach out if you think your IT needs this. We are looking out for early pilot companies that wants to see and be on top of the Flows that are being created across their business. We think we have the perfect product you might want to try and build it with us.

Contact us: support @ flowstudio.app

Business

I leave this one at the end - Flow Studio is supported by a separate business entity Flow Studio Solutions, which is also John’s first company. So, aside from writing all that wonderful code (code is so wonderful), I’m also learning everything that I loved about learning. From the next Australian financial year forward, Flow Studio invoices will come out of a company entity.

There is much uncertainty of what I just don’t know. Sales, tax, marketing, support. My problems have their own problems. Like IT needs a MAP to see their Flows, John also needs a mental map to see his business.

If you feel hey John’s cadence has slowed down - I’m sorry. My efforts are split between several major roadmap milestone features. These are bigger pieces that needs more work to get right before I can push them out the door. Hope you understand.

Reminding myself to be more kind. Scary is the unknown path I have chosen, but I need to remind myself to be more kind, there’s enough stress in the world, I shall not add more.

We hope to bring you the latest in Flow Studio very very soon! Drop us a comment or note about anything!