anthology-inc/at23-power-automate-workshop

Anthology Together 2023 Power Automate Workship

Anthology Together 2023 Power Automate Workshop

This guide is designed to walk workshop participants through the various steps of modeling a Power Automate workflow that communicates with Anthology Student and Microsoft Teams. By the completion of the workshop, participants will have a functional Power Automate workflow that can be initiated via an HTTP Trigger ( which can be invoked via the Anthology Student Workflow Engine). This workflow will accept parameters that are used to query Anthology Student and initiate a approval workflow that notifies a user via Microsoft Teams, prompts for their approval or disapproval, and then updates Anthology Student accordingly.

What you will need

In order to participate in this workshop participants will need an Azure tenet with Power Automate and Microsoft Teams. Participants will also need software (either command line or other) capable of sending HTTP POST request to URLs. We will be using Postman thoughout this guide.

---

Start by creating a simple flow and testing it

We will start by creating a very simple flow with an HTTP Trigger and a single action that will post a message to Microsoft Teams. We are going to keep this flow purposely simple. We will be adding complexity incrementally throughout the workshop.

1. In your browser navigate to https://make.powerautomate.com
2. Login using your credentials

3. Mouseover New flow and then choose Instant Cloud Flow
4. Name your flow "AT23 Document Approval"
5. Select the When an HTTP request is received trigger
6. Click Create

7. Click New Step
8. Enter in post message in the search box
9. Select the Microsoft Teams action named Post message in chat or channel

10. Select Flow bot from the Choose Post field
11. Select Chat with Flow bot in the Post in field
12. Enter in your tenet email address in the Recipient field (Use a recepient in your sandbox or target environment)
13. Enter Hello World! in the Message field.

14. Open up the When an HTTP request is received step
15. Show advanced options and change the Method field to GET

16. Save your flow
17. Copy the URL from the HTTP Trigger
18. Test your flow by clicking on Test, choosing Manually, and then clicking Test
19. Open a browser tab, paste in the HTTP URL and hit enter
20. Verify that you received a chat message in Teams
21. Verify that your flow completed successfully

---

---

Enhance the simple flow to add parameters

Now we're going to make a simple change to our flow. Testing it will be a bit more complicated because we'll be making an HTTP Post instead of a simple GET. Thus, we need a tool like Postman to test it. If you don't have Postman installed, you'll want to do that first.

1. Click Edit to open up the flow.
2. Expand the When an HTTP request is received trigger
3. Go to the advanced options and change the method field to POST.
4. In the Request Body JSON Schema field enter in the following:

{
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "message": {
            "type": "string"
        }
    }
}

5. Expand the Post a message in chat or channel action
6. Remove Hello World! from the field
7. Select the message parameter

9. Save the flow
10. In Postman (or a tool of your choice) pastie the URL and choose POST as the method.

11. Select the Body tab in the Postman request and choose the raw content type.
12. Past in the following JSON:

{
    "message": "Hello from Anthology Together 2023!"
}

13. Back in Power Automate, manually Test your flow
14. In Postman click Send
15. Verify that you received a chat message in Teams that says Hello from Anthology Together 2023!
16. Verify that your flow completed successfully

---

---

Add an approval to the flow

Now we are going to add a simple approval to the flow. The idea is to get the basic flow in place before we complicate things with Anthology Student API calls.

1. Click Edit to open the flow in the designer
2. Click + New step
3. Enter approval in the search box
4. Select Start and wait for approval

5. Select Approve/Reject - First to respond in the Approval type field
6. Enter Approval Requested in the Title field
7. Enter your email address in the Assigned to field
8. Enter Approval Required ASAP in the Details field

9. Save the flow
10. Test your flow, but this time choose Automatically and select With a recently used trigger
11. Choose the most recently used successful trigger
12. Check Microsoft Teams for the approval and approve

13. Verify that the flow completed successfully

---

Add notification of approval outcome to flow

While the approval flow works as is, we're next going to add flow control to notify a user as to the outcome of the approval.

1. Click Edit to open the flow in the designer
2. Click + New step
3. Select Control and then select Condition

4. Select Outcome, is equal to and Select Approve for the value

5. Scroll down to the Yes condition and click Add an action
6. Choose Teams and then select Post message in chat or channel just like we did previously.

7. Use the same configuration for this step as well, except in the Message field select Response summary and then enter in the text APPROVAL COMMENTS and select Responses Comments

8. Repeate step #7 for the No condition and apply the same configuration as you did for Yes except in the Message field replace APPROVAL COMMENTS with REJECTION COMMENTS

9. Save the flow
10. Test your flow, but this time choose Automatically and select With a recently used trigger
11. Choose the most recently used successful trigger
12. Check Microsoft Teams for the approval and approve/reject adding a comment
13. Verify that you received a Teams message with the correct accept/reject message
14. Verify that the flow completed successfully

---

Add Anthology Student Connector

We now have a basic flow with an HTTP trigger, an debug notification, an approval workflow, and a notification of the outcome of that workflow. We will now begin to add API calls to Anthology Student via a Connector.

1. Navigate to Data > Custom Connectors
2. Click + New custom connector > Import an OpenAPI file
3. Name the custom connector AT23 Anthology Student and import the OpenAPI file from anthology-student-connector.json

4. Accept all of the defaults on the import wizzard and click the check at the top of the screen to save the custom connector

5. Once it is saved, click "Close" to exit this connector

---

Add Anthology Student Connection

Now that we have defined a Connector, we need to configure a Connection based on this connector.

1. Navigate to Data > Custom Connectors

2. Click + next to the AT23 Anthology Student connector

3. Copy and paste the following value in the API key input field

ApplicationKey eyJDYWxsaW5nQXBwTmFtZSI6IktsYXVzIiwiS2V5VmFsdWUiOiJPZ2RjYnRiTUJCblhQWElTUldiNlJRPT0ifQ==

4. Click Create Connection

---

Setup test data in Anthology Student

Before we can invoke the Anthology Student APIs we need to login to Anthology Student and create a test document.

1. Navigate to https://sisclientweb-900188.campusnexus.dev
2. Login using the credentials you were provided
3. When prompted to select a default campus select the Eastlake campus
4. avigate to the Student List.

5. Select any student in the list
6. In the Student Profile expand Contact Manager and select Documents

7. Click + New Document
8. Select System for the value of the Module field
9. Select AT23 Document for the value of the Document field
10. Accept the defaults for all other fields
11. Click Save
12. Expand the URL and make note of the Student and Document Ids

---

Modify the input schema and test the output

Having setup our test data in Anthology Student, we can now start to add the actions to invoke Anthology Student APIs. First, however, we need to modify the JSON schema so that we can use the input parameters in our flow and test to make sure the parameters are being properly posted.

1. Edit the flow, and then expand the When a HTTP request is received trigger
2. Remove the message parameter from the JSON Schema.
3. Add two new properties to the JSON Schema: An integer named studentId and an integer named documentId.

Your completed JSON Schema should look like this:

{
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "studentId": {
            "type": "integer"
        },
        "documentId": {
            "type": "integer"
        }
    }
}

4. Update the Post message in chat or channel action to remove the message from the Message field.
5. Save the flow (this is required for us to access the new parameters)
6. Update the Message field to include the new parameters we added to the JSON Schema, studentId, and documentId.

7. Save the flow
8. Since we changed the JSON Schema we need to go back to Postman and update the request body to include those fields. Use the values from Anthology Student that you made note of above

9. Test the flow Manually (because the posted data has changed) and submit the API call via Postman to initiate the HTTP POST
10. Verify that the message you received in Microsoft Teams includes the appropriate studentId and documentId
11. Verify that the approval flow works as it did previously

---

Add Anthology Student API calls

Now that the JSON schema has been updated and tested, we can add Anthology Student API calls which will make use of these parameters.

1. Insert a new step after the Post message in chat or channel action
2. Select Custom and then choose the AT23 Anthology Student connector
3. Select the Get Student By Id operation

4. Select the studentId parameter for the id field

5. Insert a new step after the Get Student By Id action
6. Select Custom and then choose the AT23 Anthology Student connector
7. Select the Get Document operation

8. Select the documentId parameter for the id field

9. Save the flow
10. Verify it looks like this:

---

Use data from the Anthology Student API Calls

Having added Anthology Student API calls to the flow, we now need to ensure that they really work. We'll start with some simple variables which will be populated from the returned API data. We'll then use these variables in the Microsoft Teams approval workflow.

1. Click Insert a new step after the Get Document step
2. Type in var in the search box and then select Initialize variable

3. Enter URL in the Name field
4. Select string in the Type field
5. Enter https://sisclientweb-900188.campusnexus.dev/ in the Value field

6. Repeat the above instructions to add a new Initialize variable step below the URL variable
7. Enter Link in the Name field
8. Select string in the Type field
9. Use the URL variable, the studentId parameter, and the documentId parameter to construct the link to the Student Document in Anthology Student.

10. Repeat the above instructions to add a new Initialize variable step below the Link variable
11. Enter Name in the Name field
12. Select string in the Type field
13. In the value field enter the following expression:

concat(body('Get_Student_By_Id')['payload/data']['FirstName'],' ',body('Get_Student_By_Id')['payload/data']['LastName'])

14. Expand the Start and wait for approval step
15. Update the Details field to include the Name variable
16. Update the Item link field with the Link variable
17. Update the Item link description field with the text Go to student document

18. Save the flow
19. Test your flow Automatically and select With a recently used trigger
20. Choose the most recently used successful trigger
21. Verify that the approval request includes the appropriate values from the Anthology Student API requests

---

Update Anthology Student via the API based on the approval workflow

Now we get to close the loop! Based on the result of the approval, we are going to update Anthology Student via the API to change the status of the document.

1. Expand the Condition step and then expand the Apply to step in the If yes block

2. Click Add an action after the Post message in chat or channel action
3. Choose Custom, select AT23 Anthology Student, then choose Update Student Document

4. Select Completion Date for the approvedDate field
5. Select Response Comments for the note field
6. Enter 11 for the documentStatusId field (this is the Id for Approved)
7. Map all the remaining fields to the Document instance retrieved via the API previously using the following expression:

outputs('GetDocument')?['body/payload/data/<FIELDNAMEHERE>']

8. Repeat the steps above for Denied using 12 for the documentStatusId field
9. Test the flow
10. Verify that the appropriate Document was updated in Anthology Student accordingly

Congratulations, you have completed the Workshop!