Microsoft Flow In 10 Days - Day Two - The Famous Twitter Flow, My Flows, Team Flows, Share A Flow

Chandru D
Jun 10, 2018

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Hi folks! Today, I will be covering the day two topic of my Microsoft Flow series. If you have not checked my previous post about Microsoft Flow, I recommend you have a look at it. Links to the previous posts are given below.

What I am going to cover:

I am planning to write a series on MS Flow in which I will cover most of the areas in it. This will be a ten-day series.

Day 1: Flow Templates, Connectors, Triggers, Actions, Conditions
Day 2: The famous Twitter flow, My Flows, Team Flows, Share a Flow
Day 3: Flow in Mobiles Debug a flow, export, and import a flow
Day 4: Approval Flow (sequential and parallel)
Day 5: Flow with SharePoint on-prem (Gateways)
Day 6: Flow vs logic apps
Day 7: Flow with custom applications web services
Day 8: Flow with Graph API
Day 9: Flow with Cognitive services
Day 10: Flow Administration and DLP, Pricing etc.

A few points before moving to the topic

Microsoft Flow is an online service that helps in connecting various apps and services. And those include Microsoft products such as SharePoint, Dynamics, Excel, Power BI etc., as well as non-Microsoft services like Twitter, Facebook, and MailChimp.

The Famous Twitter flow

Now I will be showing a demo of how we can create a flow.

As I am basically from a SharePoint background, my examples will be more about SharePoint related tasks.

Click on "My Flow" at the top and it directs you to the page where my running flows are listed. Now click on "Create from blank".

On the next page, click on "Create from blank"

First, we have to add a trigger on which the Flow has to start.

I am selecting "SharePoint" from the options given below. This opens up a container in which all the possible triggers are present. If you wish to know what a trigger means, you can check my previous article here. We can create triggers of our own and that will be covered later in this series.

Note
We have a link to the UserVoice section of Microsoft (at the bottom) where we can post our ideas or suggestions that Microsoft will consider for its future release of MS flow.

I am going to select "SharePoint - When an item is created" trigger. (Refer to the screenshot above)

If you are already logged in with SharePoint Online, we will be seeing the below page. Otherwise, you have to log in to your SharePoint Site.

Click inside the "Site Address"; it opens a drop down. Select "Enter custom Value". Now we can paste our site's URL.

Click on "List Name". It will list all the lists in our site. For this example, I am going to select "Products" which is my sample list here.

Click on New Step. It opens a dialog below. Click Add an action from that dialog.

Once the above action is completed, it opens a similar container which we have seen in the first step of this tutorial. This shows all the services which can be invoked for the next step. I am going to choose "Twitter" from it.

Once it is selected, I could see all the actions associated with Twitter.

Now, I am going to post a tweet on my Twitter handle. This can be done by selecting "Twitter - Post a tweet" from the options shown.

If you are not already logged in to the Twitter account, it is going to ask for your "Sign In".

Once I log in to Twitter, I give access to my MS Flow and PowerApps to do actions to my Twitter account, and our flow becomes like this.

We are given the flexibility to enter the Tweet’s text inside. Once you click on this, we see the ultimate beauty of our Microsoft Flow.

Yes, we are able to see the metadata from the previous actions or services. From this what I mean is, (in this example) we could see the metadata that contains details related to the SharePoint service that we have connected above.

Here I am going to select the “Title” column. Let’s see what is going to happen.

You can see from the above picture that it has taken the reference of the Title of the Item which I will be creating in the Products list.

For example, If there are more than one actions above the Twitter connector here, it will show all the service's metadata when clicking on the “Tweet text.”

Now save the flow and we are going to have a run now by creating an item in SharePoint.

I have created an item in the “Products” list with the title “Twitter flow test”. And as expected it posted a Tweet in Twitter Handle.

See how amazingly it handles things!!!!!

Now you can imagine how this has opened up a new spectrum of ideas to the people out there like us. We can easily connect to almost any service without writing a single piece of code.

Thus I have covered the step by step method of the famous Twitter Flow. Next, I will cover the remaining topics for today.

My Flow

This is the place where I can see all the flows created by me. On clicking “My Flows” on the ribbon, It navigates to this page.

Here, I have the option to “Edit the Flow” by clicking the “pencil’ button. I can also share it with other persons by clicking on the “people” signal next to the pencil icon. I also have the ability to turn the flow “On” or “Off”.

Share a Flow & Team Flow

What is the use of a product if we are not sharing it with others? Thus came the “Team Flow”. By clicking the “people” icon, it navigates to a page where we can add people to “My Flow” so that it becomes a “Team Flow.”