Introduction
Microsoft Flow is an online workflow service that enables you to work smarter and more efficiently by automating workflows across the most common apps and services.
On October 31, 2016 Microsoft Flow's General Availability was announced.
Microsoft Flow enriches both Office 365 and Dynamics 365 with new workflow capabilities.
One of the capabilities that makes Microsoft Flow so powerful is you can use data from any data source, anywhere in your workflow. I will be explaining this in one of my demos.
This is sort of a replacement to the most powerful tool of the SharePoint family – SharePoint Designer.
Even though there are one or two functionalities which are available in SharePoint Designer are not yet released in our MS Flow, we could say without any doubt that MS Flow has a huge spectrum of functionalities which will make the life of the developers and power-users very easier.
What I am going to cover,
I am planning to write a series on MS Flow on which I will cover most of the areas in it. This will be a 10 days series
Create a Simple Flow
Without any further delay, I am jumping into the Flow Development.
Go to the Homepage of flow and Sign in with your Microsoft Account.
Skipping out the jargons, I will create a simple flow and will explain things from there.
Scroll a bit to the template region. There you can see a lot of templates segregated by some logical groups. I am selecting on the famous template of Flow. Get daily weather reports delivered to your mail and phone.
It navigates to the next page which shows the Steps involved in this template.
Click Continue. It goes to the next page showing the steps involved inside it.
Click on Create flow. It will ask for Location Block’s Inputs field.
I am entering “Chennai” in the Inputs field and again clicked on “Create Flow” at the top. Now our flow is successfully created. Click on Test flow.
It opens up a pane on the right side. Select “I’ll perform the trigger action” and click on “Test”.
It opens up a modal in which click on the “Run Flow”.
Flow starts running and this is also confirmed through a modal box.
On Clicking Done it opens up the flow activity screen in which it shows the steps and its status whether it has ran or not.
Check your Microsoft mail and you would have received this mail.
Thus we have created a simple flow and it has ran successfully. We have started to toddle.
Ok. Now we will hold on a while and break it down a bit on what we have done.
Template in Flow
First we selected a template. Template is the one which is a set of rules and conditions which are all combined in a single bundle. On selecting that we can leverage the already built in logics and we don’t have to write from the scratch.
So the next question arises. Is selecting template is the only way to start a flow?
No there a many ways. We can,
- Select from a template as we have seen above.
- Select a service from the home page which in-turn becomes the trigger (first step) for your flow.
- On clicking My Flows in the ribbon, we can see there is an option to create a flow from the scratch.
- There is an option to Import the flow (from an already saved flow). This we’ll discuss later in this series.
Connectors aka Services
There are around “220” services to which the flow can connect and these can be combined to form a workflow like SharePoint, SalesForce, Mailchimp, Twitter, Facebook etc... Sounds Amazing, right!!!. And the number will increase rapidly in due course of time.
Other than these predefined connectors we can create our own HTTP connector (webservice from your custom application) to provide data from it to other systems. We will cover this in the Day 7 of our series.
I will show a sample and very famous flow in the next part of the series, connecting SharePoint and Twitter and the flow will be when an item is created in SharePoint, our flow triggers and tweets about it.
Triggers in Flow
- Triggers are the events of every system responsible for the starting of the flow. Every system has its own set of events that can be a trigger to a flow. For example we will see a couple of systems.
Facebook – When a new post is posted on my timeline, it can be a trigger to a flow which can add a list item in my SharePoint with the content from the Facebook post.
Twitter – Whenever there is tweet with a specific hashtag that can be added as a row in Excel, or a lead in CRM Dynamics, item in SharePoint or a mail to a person with the body that contains the Tweet’s content.
Now you would have understood how powerful the flow is!!! Sky is your limit if you understand nuances of Flow.
- Recurrence trigger – This helps in scheduling a flow to run in a periodical manner, can be daily or every hour or every minute. In our flow stated above, we have used the “Recurrence” trigger.
Conditions and Actions
Instead of explaining this topic, I will take our above flow here
The above image itself is self-explanatory. If the Rain Chance is greater than 20, the left block below will execute and if it is not the right block will execute.
The data from the above steps will be filled in the forthcoming steps. This will be explained in detail in the next part of this series.
I am just scratched the surface of flow. In the forthcoming parts of this series we will deep-dive into this.
Thanks for reading and share me your thoughts below.