Getting Started With Logic Apps In Azure Portal

Prerequisites

  • Microsoft Azure Account.
  • A Twitter account
  • A Outlook.com or hosted Office 365 mailbox

Logic apps

Logic apps offer a way to make things easier and implement scalable integrations and Workflows in the Cloud. It provides a visual designer a way to model and automate our process as a series of steps known as a Workflow. There are several connectors across the Cloud and On-Premises to quickly integrate across services and protocols. A logic app starts with a trigger and after firing can begin many combination actions, conversions, and logic conditions.

The advantages of using Logic apps consists of what is shown below.

  • Getting started quickly from the templates
  • Customizing our logic app with our own custom APIs, code and actions.
  • Saving time by designing complex processes, using easy to understand design tools.
  • Build off of BizTalk Server, API Management, Azure Functions and Azure Service Bus with first-class integration support.

Why Logic apps?

Logic apps brings speed and scalability into the enterprise integration space and ease of use of the designer, variety of available triggers and actions, and powerful management tools make centralizing our API's simpler than ever.

  • Easy to use design tool.
  • Connect API's easily.
  • Get started quickly from the templates.
  • Extensibility baked-in.
  • Real integration horsepower.

Logic app concepts

The following are some of the key points that make up the Logic apps experience.

  • Workflow
    Provides a graphical way to model our business processes as a series of steps or a Workflow.

  • Managed Connectors
    Our Logic apps need access to the data and Services. Managed connectors are created specifically to aid you, when we are connecting to and working with our data.

  • Triggers
    A trigger starts a new instance of a Workflow, which is based on a specific event like the arrival of an E-mail or a change in our Azure Storage account.

  • Actions
    Each step after the trigger in a Workflow is called an action. Each action typically maps to an operation on our managed connector or custom API apps.

  • Enterprise Integration Pack
    Logic apps includes capabilities from BizTalk. BizTalk is Microsoft's industry leading integration platform. Enterprise Integration Pack connectors allows us to easily include validation, transformation and more in to our Logic app Workflows.

Now, let's get started with the following steps.

Step 1

Sign in to the online Microsoft Azure portal.

Step 2

Click “+NEW” and choose “Enterprise Integration”. Select “Logic Apps”.



Step 3

In the Create logic app account blade, enter a name for our logic app, select a location, resource group and select Create.

 

Step 4

After creating our Logic app for the first time, we can select from a template to start. For now, click
Blank Logic App to build this from scratch.



Step 5

The first item which we need to create is the trigger. This is the event that will start our logic app. Search for twitter in the trigger search box and select it.
  

Step 6

Now, sign into our twitter account.

  
 
After entering the username and password, click Authorize app button.

  

Step 7

Now, we will type in a search text (Example: #Azure) to trigger on. The frequency and interval will determine how often our logic app will check for the new tweets.

  

Step 8

Select the New step button and then choose Add an action.

  
Step 9

Now, you can search from the available connectors to choose an action. For example, we can select Outlook.com - Send Email to send mail from an outlook.com address.

 
Now, sign into our Outlook mail account.
  
 
 

Step 10

After signing into the mail account, we have to enter the parameters for the E-mail, which we require.

  
Step 11

Finally, we can select Save to create our logic app live.

 

A few minutes later, we will get Logic app dashboard.

  

Output

Summary

This is how we create and use Logic apps in Microsoft Azure portal.