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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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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


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.




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.

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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.

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!



Flow Studio features in April that will help us mitigate a disaster

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In the best scenario, nothing ever fails. Your code and logic doesn’t fail, flows don’t fail, SharePoint doesn’t fail, Azure doesn’t fail.

Some days like yesterday aren’t as wonderful. I’m sure everyone “went home” on Thursday, but there’s a daunting task on Friday - how do we know business continuity has been maintained? Where do we even start?

I hope you are reading this while coming into your work on a Friday morning. Because I’m offering a great solution with Flow Studio, and I think you will have a wonderful Friday.

We can’t perform miracles every day, but today, the Flow Studio team thinks we have a good shot at give you back a “great Friday”

Flow Studio free feature update for March ~ April

This blog post is about several new features that were added to Flow Studio during March to April. Flow Studio is a power tool we’ve built for Power Users to work with their Microsoft Flows. We believe in Flow automations, and we want your Flows to be successful. It is an coincidence that many of the features we paid attention to during March and April forms a complete set of tools when it comes to disaster mitigation. Let us explain how these work together.

Sparklines

We introduced Flow Run Sparklines in March, and improved the performance over April. In Flow Studio - your runs are not second tier citizens - they are top tier. We want you to see immediately on Friday morning, which ones of your Flows have failed.

This is important. Because this was my task this morning. I reviewed all the Flows in my environment, and at a glance - I could identify which ones have failed and needs immediate migitation.

Flow Runs, with Context

Clicking on Sparklines takes me right into the latest set of Flow runs - many of them have failed. Flow Studio understands the trigger data (SharePoint, Dynamics or CDS) and brings the context of each trigger to the front. We don’t see just random Run IDs - instead we see the trigger item id, title or filename. These to help makers select the correct runs to re-submit.


Bulk re-submit

When we are sure the Flow is ready to be re-submitted, Flow Studio gives us the ability to bulk select our failed runs and re-submit them.

Flow Run deletion (future)

Deleting Runs is a feature we are expecting to appear (since it has been announced for Logic Apps) - so we have already added support for this feature. As far as we are aware - this API has not been available on any environment.

In the future, when Flows have been successfully re-submitted, we expect the Maker may choose to delete the old failed run and keep the successful, resubmitted run.

Deleting failed runs so we only have successful runs is sort of cheating, but we LOVE SUCCESS! 100% allowed!

Flow Studio subscription feature update

Sparklines for admins

Flow Subscription allows a maker (with Flow P2 license) to see all the Flows made within that environment.

The new Sparklines is also available here - this allows us to observe all the Flows are successful in the entire environment.

There are Flows that may belong to a solution, belong to a team (that excludes you), or even belong to a Resource owner like SharePoint (so they don’t have an actual Flow user owner). To see those Flows - you’ll need to get Flow Studio subscription, because we can only see them via the P2 admin API.

Approvals (v2) cancellation

In the latest Approvals V2 update - Approvals can now be cancelled. Flow Studio provides bulk Approval cancellation.

We feel this is a situational feature - it may be useful if a lot of Flows have been accidentally ran and created a lot of duplicate Approvals that we might want to cancel in bulk.

But it is very possible that during the disaster of May 2019 - we have a lot of approvals created and then the Flow failed. So in re-submitting these Flows again, we wouldn’t want to have a lot of duplicated approvals. Bulk approval cancellation would be very useful in this scenario.


Thank You

Thank you for your support of Flow Studio App - we hope your business processes have not been impacted, and we hope you were able to use Flow Studio to restart your Flows.

We think the combination of Sparklines, Runs with Context and Bulk Resubmit is a timely reminder of the Flow Studio mission.

Flow to Success!

https://flowstudio.app