Where to find John presenting in May 2020

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We are living right now in a strange time. At home, and virtual events are replacing the traditional physical events.

I’ve agreed to several events and will be presenting all new (or freshly updated) topics for 2020. So while we remain physically distant, if you wanted to see one of my presentations - I’m actually a lot more visible.

May 01 - DC Power Apps & Power Automate usergroup - Why and How to implement Governance of the Power Platform

May 06 - Sydney Serverless meetup - Power Automate - Microsoft’s insane low-code serverless platform

May 11 - M365 May - Deep dive into Approvals in SharePoint and Teams with Power Automate

May 11 - USYD Cloud Society Azure/Power Up! - Intro Power Apps and Power Automate

May 15 - Sydney Power Apps and Flow usergroup - What’s new in Power Virtual Agents with Charles Sterling

May 16 - D365 Automation Saturday - Flow JAM Stack - how to build a complete low-code public website in 40 minutes

May 25 - UNSW Cloud Society - Azure/Power Up! - Intro Power Apps and Power Automate

May 26 - M365 May - Why and How to implement Governance of the Power Platform

May 27-28 - M365 Virtual Marathon - 5 Design Keys to make Flows run insanely fast

May 27-28 - M365 Virtual Marathon - Flow JAM Stack - how to build a complete low-code public website backed by M365

I’m still working on my YouTube series: How to build a public website with a Flow JAM Stack

Because of the events next week, I couldn’t work on an episode this week. But next Saturday’s Flow JAM Stack talk during the Automation Saturday will be a 40 minutes compressed teaser. Hope to catch you at one or many of these upcoming events.

Implementing a fast sort with Microsoft Flow using Parallel Compute

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This is #FlowNinja hack 112. Parallel Compute Sort.

I had written about how to sort with a variable (this is insertion sort) back in 2018 How to implement sort with Microsoft Flow-in-3-actions-within-a-loop

But in this previous method, the use of variable means we can’t run apply to each in parallel, so this method was always slow when array is large. Today, while chatting with Hiro - I had a sudden idea to revisit the pattern and see if I can make this quicker.

Photo by Amy Shamblen on Unsplash

Photo by Amy Shamblen on Unsplash

The problem

To create a sort, using parallel apply to each, and get a sorted array at the end.



In 2018, I didn’t have many of the patterns I need to make this new 2020 sort method. Firstly, to get results from parallel apply to each, we need Pieter’s Method (Compose apply to each inner output) to fan-in after parallel fan-in.

Second, we need to sort the actual array, and I came up with a pretty interesting method.



How this works

Consider array [ “d”, “e”, “c”, “b”, “a” ]
If we say for each character, filter array for items that are < than the current item, we’d get:

3:d, 4:e, 2:c, 1:b, 0:a

Then, if we consider, hey, we have 5 items

[0, 1, 2, 3, 4] => map to this dictionary, we’d get [ “a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, “e” ]



Side Story

I actually was thinking about this pattern while driving home, once it clicked I had to pull over the side, park the car, take out my laptop and write this Flow, and after I saw it work I drove home.



Steps

Some additional considerations


If the original array has duplicates

[ “a”, “b”, “b”, “c” ]
0:a, 1:b, 3:c

We’ll see 2 is missing. This is not end of the world, but when we do the final map of

[0,1,2,3] => [ “a”, “b”, null, “c” ]

Observation

I was worried that JSON('{ "0": "a", "0":"a" }') would give an error, but it seems like the duplicate key is ignored. This could be an interesting way to detect duplicates in the future by building a dictionary.





Flow - Format Number advanced tips and tricks

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I put together a video to celebrate the new update in Microsoft Flow (Power Automate) and Logic Apps - formatNumber()

The video explains 3 tips and 2 gotchas.

  • Tip 1: Use action in prod right now

  • Tip 2: Use ### and 000 patterns in formatNumber() expressions

  • Gotcha 2.1: May be don't use of $### - use $##0

  • Gotcha 2.2: May be don't use $ - use C or C2

  • Tip 3: Use formatNumber in collections with Select/Create HTML

If you want the clipboard paste of the Format Number action to use, use this.

{
    "id": "c1fa8a84-e2c0-4be0-823e-3a45-1e6834aa",
    "brandColor": "#a098e6",
    "connectionReferences": {},
    "icon": "https://psuxaustralia.azureedge.net/Content/Images/DesignerOperations/numberfunctions.png",
    "isTrigger": false,
    "operationName": "Format_number",
    "operationDefinition": {
        "type": "Expression",
        "kind": "FormatNumber",
        "inputs": {
            "number": 12345,
            "format": "C4"
        },
        "runAfter": {
            "Compose": [
                "Succeeded"
            ]
        }
    }
}

Azure Global Bootcamp Sydney - this Saturday!

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Photo by James Ree on Unsplash

Photo by James Ree on Unsplash

I’m presenting a talk on Azure Logic Apps (and Microsoft Flow) this Saturday at the Azure Global Bootcamp Sydney.

https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Azure-Sydney-User-Group/events/256253065/


[Update 2019-04-28 Video livestream]

I start at 1:15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kZZbKsHrGI&feature=youtu.be&t=4543

Our day of developer talks streamed live on Saturday 27 April 2019.

LogicApps & Flow for Developers - insane low-Code Serverless Automation

We make the case that every developer must understand what LogicApps and Microsoft Flow are, because they will make us rethink how we really write code.

There is always more code to write, but what if we can

  • Use out of the box actions when we don't need to write code

  • Connect to new systems painlessly

  • Connect to APIs that we have never used before

  • Not worry about how much it all costs

  • Build microservice architecture solutions

  • Fall into pit of success


Join this session to learn about how to write code, fast, without writing code.


This is a similar session (with more focus on Azure Logic Apps - there’s always room for tweaking) from a talk I’ve done previously, most notably during the MS Ignite Roadshow.

The talk is aimed at developers. There’s no assumption that you would know much about Logic Apps or Microsoft Flow, but think of this as a baptism by fire - an mid-level introduction that goes right into parallelism and HTTP requests.

These are what one would often consider to be difficult developer concepts - and as we will all see, these are extremely easy to achieve in Logic Apps / Microsoft Flow.

Join us this Saturday - how to write code fast without writing code.



Upload Image from PowerApps to Flow to SharePoint via an Unused Outlook connector

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This is the simplest no code approach to the PowerApps image upload problem so far. Far simpler than with Azure Function, with custom connector, with hacked Flow button via Flow Studio, even simpler than Azure Blob Storage. All standard connectors so no premium required, and no risk of PowerApps trigger resetting and breaking the connection.

This is my simplest method to upload any image from PowerApps to SharePoint

  • No Swagger

  • No Edit JSON

  • No Azure Blob Storage

  • All Standard Connectors

  • No HTTP

  • Can easily add more arguments


Original

This blog post is a cleaned up version of the #Flow Ninja hack 87 thread which happened on Sunday night. https://twitter.com/johnnliu/status/1114863521525669888

Follow me on Twitter and catch the next live hack.


[Updated: 2019-04-27] Video version, PnP SharePoint Community Call from Chaks

From @chakkradeep

This community call demo is taken from the SharePoint General Development Special Interest Group recording on 18th of April 2019. In this video Chaks (Microsoft) shows how you can upload files to SharePoint from PowerApps using Microsoft Flow Presenter - Chakkaradeep (Chaks) Chinnakonda Chandran (Microsoft) - @chakkaradeep Full details on the community call from https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/blogs/sharepoint-dev-community-pnp-general-sp-dev-sig-recording-18th-of-april-2019/ More details on the SharePoint dev community calls from http://aka.ms/sppnp.


Steps - first a bit of study and exploration

I have a @MicrosoftFlow hack this evening to send files from @PowerApps to @SharePoint I have been thinking about this one for a while. So if you are still awake, follow along.

First - I check the Flow button trigger.
Then create a PowerApps trigger, use peek code to study

Double check SharePoint connector - I read this with FlowStudioApp - there's no method that takes format: byte. Everything wants format: binary.

I spent a while looking through various standard connectors looking for something that does format: byte - I found one. In the Outlook connector.
In send email with attachment. **cackle** **evil grin**

Evil twinkle in the eye acquired - we now execute the plan

So we hack the PowerApps trigger. by using a totally unrelated connector.
I can't hold back my dislike of the PowerApps trigger. Why can't it behave more like the Flow button trigger...

The argument sendanemail_attachmentscontent is ugly. Try using Flow Studio to rename them first before you go too far. This will also make the connection tidier when you take it over to PowerApps.

Finally

PowerApps time - this is probably my simplest method.
Don't need Azure blob storage
Don't need edit json
Don't need swagger
Can have multiple arguments

5-2.png

Just need to conditionally build a strange Flow that doesn't use the outlook connector but use it to lock the PowerApps trigger

  • See the condition is always false - it doesn’t run

  • See also the Size of the create file is much larger than a broken blob string

  • We need to keep the unused Send an email action even if we don’t use it - because it locks the PowerApps trigger in place so the trigger doesn’t reset.


And there we have it - the absolutely simplest no-code solution to send a File from PowerApps to SharePoint with ease.

We lock the PowerApps trigger to format: byte by using an otherwise unused Outlook send mail connector.

Future

There are a few things Microsoft could do that will make this even easier. If they ever get around to it:

  • Allow us to define PowerApps trigger directly either by using Flow Button UI or Request schema

  • Allow SharePoint connector to accept format: byte

  • Allow PowerApps to send format: binary, right now PowerApps converts that to string, dropping the non-character bytes from the data it sends to Flow