Tag: Microsoft Flow

Create Child Flows in Power Automate

With the new October release, Microsoft has added support for Child flows. This is awesome as this allows for flow to be better structured and broken down into a smaller set of reusable actions. Let’s dive into how it works.

Where can you build them: in Solutions, This feature is only available in CDS solutions as of now.

what is required for a flow to be a Child Workflow : 

Trigger: Child flow needs a Trigger which can accept a request, two ways to do it is:

      • Manual Trigger: Using “Flow Button” trigger:
    •  
      • Request Trigger: Using Http Request trigger

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Flow: Connectors for Common Data Service Platform

Last week, I was prepping for my session at Dynamics 365 Summit on Logic Apps and noticed my Flow connector got few more features added. Often time Logic Apps connector is more advanced than the same connector in Flow, this is so not true when for CDS/Dynamics. 

Flow currently has 3 Connectors for connecting to CDS/Dynamics 365:

Dynamics 365 Connector: was the first D365 connector published and has been around since Flow & Logic Apps were released. This connector went through a couple of revision and has been deemed deprecated since April 22nd in Favour of CDS Connector

Common Data Service: This was released when CDS was released this is the recommended connector to be used with Flow and Logic Apps when creating independent flow. This connector has parity with Dynamics 365 connector which has been deprecated.

Common Data Service (current environment): is the newest Flow connector, released earlier this year. As the name suggests this connector is Environment specific and solution aware. it also has a lot of new features(actions/Triggers).

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Global Integration Bootcamp – Calgary

Global Integration Bootcamp is a global scale, integration focussed Bootcamp hosted and organized locally and backed by Microsoft. It is held across the world in over 25 cities. The event focuses on all Azure Integration services and applications.

This year I had an opportunity to bring this event to Calgary and Host and organize it along with Dhina Gajavarathan. This was my first time organizing such an event and I wasn’t sure how it will go. To start with we had two speakers Myself and Dhina, But I can’t be thankful enough to the Community who came out to support it.

We published the event on Friday afternoon and by  Monday we had 3 Microsoft MVP’s as Speakers and 25+ attendee already registered.

With Kent Weare, Shamir Charania and David Drever coming onboard as speakers for the event, we were certain that we will have more registrations coming,  We tried to move the locations to Microsoft Office but being an after office weekend event made it a challenge.

Nasir Nasiruddin from Microsoft helped us out and we were able to move the location to MTC, Microsoft Office, which is the perfect location for hosting an event like this. This was key as I got to know later that few of the cities had to cancel the Integration Bootcamp event as the team not able to secure a location for the event.

Event Day was fun, we started early to set things up. Our friend Sarvesh Thuse was of great help, helping us with setup, prep, managing Registration Booth and guiding Attendees.

We had a great Event with very engaged attendees, thanks to awesome speakers and engaging Agenda for the day. We had high participation(40 attendees out of 53 registrations) and attendee engagement in our Q&A Panel discussion.

Here are some of the pics from the Event.

[ngg src=”galleries” ids=”1″ sortorder=”19,12,25,23,4,1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,13,14,15,16,17,18,20,21,22,24,26,27″ display=”basic_slideshow” arrows=”1″ interval=”2000″ show_thumbnail_link=”1″] Continue reading “Global Integration Bootcamp – Calgary”

Migrating Microsoft Flow To Azure Logic App Service

With the increasing popularity of Microsoft Flow and ease of setup quite often we start with a self-service integration using Microsoft Flow and later need to switch them to Azure Logic apps.

As Flow is built on the top of Logic Apps it’s a simple export-import(Export and Deploy) process to switch them over. In this blog, we will go over converting an existing flow integration to Logic Apps Service.

I have built a Flow which is triggered when a case is created in Dynamics 365 and in turns creates a work item in Visual Studio Team services for the team to work on. As a lot of Cases are being submitted I will switch them over to Logic Apps for better monitoring.

In order to migrate my first step is to export this Flow as Logic Apps from My Flow Page. Continue reading “Migrating Microsoft Flow To Azure Logic App Service”

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Connector for Logic App gets an update

Last week Microsoft released an update for Dynamics 365 Connector for Logic App, there are few long-awaited features in this update which I am excited about.

With this update Microsoft has added support for option sets being exposed as strings in the response, this used to be a challenge earlier as Optionset value and mapping had to be hardcoded in the Logic app or Azure Functions.

the difference in the options set value in the output:


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Integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 using Azure Logic App Service

In this post I’ll discuss Data Integration using Azure Logic App Service, we will create a Logic app that gets triggered when a case is created in Dynamics 365 and inturns creates a work item in Visual Studio Team services for the team to work on.

Logic App workflow is built using series of actions and Connectors, and has its own JSON based workflow definition schema, for details refer to my blog on The Basics of Azure Logic Apps Schema and Codeview editing

Pre-requisites
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online instance (On-premise instance could be used as well using Azure Data Gateway)
  • Microsoft Azure subscription for creating a Logic APP (If you don’t have an Azure subscription you can either use Try a Logic App feature which creates a logic app for an hour or you may sign up for a Trial account.)
  • Visual Studio Team services account (SignUp link).

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Basics of Azure Logic Apps Schema and Codeview editing

Integrations using Logic App could be a fun exercise. Logic App provides a visual designer to model and automate your workflow process as a series of steps called as workflow designer UI,  for complex requirement Code view comes handy. In this blog, I will talk about the structure of logic app definition.

Let’s start with some basic components of Logic App.

    • Logic App Visual designer actually creates a JSON file with workflow definitions. JSON structure for Logic app

{
"$schema": "",
"contentVersion": "",
"parameters": { },
"triggers": [ { } ],
"actions": [ { } ],
"outputs": { }
}

$Schema, content version and static values and are set to schema and version automatically.

Parameters are important as they help parameterize the logic app and assist with Deployments and change management. I will go more in-depth in my subsequent blog on Logic App and Change management/ALM.

Triggers: define the trigger criteria for the workflow. to access the output of trigger @triggerBody() could be used.

Actions: define the actions within the workflow, actions are nested and using runAfter you may define the dependent action or parallel action flow.

Outputs: refer to the response of the workflow post execution of all the actions. Most of our Integration scenario doesn’t use the output as we will have another action to consume the output.

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 & Integrations

In today’s business, it’s key to have Unified systems and process. Often businesses struggle to integrate enterprise data across their ever-growing number of applications and systems, resulting in applications which are meant to help but actually harm productivity.

Disconnected systems often overload employees with much of the painstaking work of searching data, data entry, data processing, and business analysis, and in some cases, data synchronization is manual and the onus of data integrity across systems will fall to employees.

When businesses invest in digital transformation projects to improve efficiency and gain a competitive edge, they have to plan on how new systems and apps will interact with each other. Burdening their employees with the task of manually migrating data between various systems easily counteracts any ROI.

Almost every Microsoft Dynamics 365 Implementation requires some level of Integration in real or near real time with other systems. At first, Microsoft Dynamics integration may seem like a daunting task but there are a lot of tools by Microsoft and ISV’s which makes it easier, Let’s dive in and look into some of the key options which have almost become industry standards for Dynamics 365 Integrations.

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