John Liu .NET

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Microsoft Flow makes everything Awesome. Yes, including InfoPath #microblog

This is a write up of various ideas and thoughts that I've shared over Twitter separately, but needed to be linked together and the example steps needs to be explained in a bit more detail.

Plan

On Reading many XML Forms in a Forms Library

Crazy InfoPath and PowerApps cross-app idea

with game state managed with Microsoft Flow, with JSON and XML dual binding.

API Management TIP

from @darrenjrobinson

Flow Details

In this Flow, we will do something fancy.  We will use the new Flow Management connector to list all the Flows in my environment.

Configure the HTTP Request method must be GET
The response must be XML - use xml() to convert JSON into XML output.

Check this in Postman

This is how you test a webservice.  You poke it with Postman.

See this returns XML.

The rest is done in InfoPath

Connect it via REST connection.

This is pretty amazing.  InfoPath is listing in a repeating section the names of all the Flows I have in my environment.

Result

  • Because of Flow, InfoPath got server side superpowers it never had
  • Flow gain the ability to work with Managed Metadata today.  And so did InfoPath.  Only 7 years after MMD was shipped without InfoPath support.

Flow is awesome.