Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 15 Feb 2023

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From YouTube: How to use "when an action is performed" trigger in Power Automate

Description

In this 13-minute citizen developer-focused demo, Yannick Reekmans delivers a practical introduction to event driven architecture. Structure your flow so that other people in your tenant can plug their own logic (child flows) into it. Learn about the Plugin Registration Tool. Step through Registering a Custom API and adding it to your Power Automate trigger. Essentially, you are splitting the flow logic into separate components that others can hook without impacting the core flow/app.

This PnP Community demo is taken from the Microsoft Power Platform community call – February 2023, recorded on February 15, 2023.

Demo Presenter
• Yannick Reekmans (Qubix) | @YannickReekmans

Community Call Conversation
• https://aka.ms/Feb15-Demo3

Supporting materials
• Documentation - Create and use Custom APIs | https://learn.microsoft.com/power-apps/developer/data-platform/custom-api

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Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/community/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/community/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/community/home
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community Blog - https://aka.ms/community/blog

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Business applications and M365 development, MVP I, occasionally blog I tweet a lot and I present in community conferences, a lot more. So that's where you find me um now, this random action is performed. Triggering power automate for dataverse is something I recently discovered and I. Think many people don't really know the value of this thing and it um once you understand it, you don't really get why it gets less love than the other Traders.

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um So let's walk through it. First of all, so there are some business requirements because we'll walk through this in a scenario based thing. So our requirement is that when the project is created or modified in dataverse and the cost for that project is more than 10 000 Euros then we'd like an email to be sent to the CEO and we'll add the CEO as a project member on my project.

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Now, if you build this um in a typical solution, this is what you'd get you do. A random row is edit, modified or deleted trigger on dataverse on your projects, table you'll check the condition and you find the cost field and you'll do um if the thing the cost is bigger, greater than or equal to 10 000 Euros, and if uh the answer is yes, you'll send an email and you'll do the add the member to the project action.

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So there's that now what if your business requirements get an update, we also want. If this is an expensive project, we really like to schedule weekly status meetings with people, so you go back to that original flow and you add the create an event action now.

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All in all, this is okay, if there's only three actions necessary to fulfill each of your business requirements, but when things get more complicated, complex or it's you that are doing this one thing this one condition and a team member in a different project needs to plug in or book in to your action as well, then this can become super messy. An additional solution to this could possibly be to call a child workflow, but calling a child workflow always means you'll need to update or edit the main workflow this one to call additional actions.

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So what if we could do it or turn this around? What if we could build an event-driven solution where, as soon as this condition is met, we throw an event we publish that this has happened. Essentially, we perform an action to show that an expensive project is created so that every other workflow or every other thing that needs to hook into this event just can be a different Power automate flow. That's registered on when an action is performed on your project on the action expensive project created.

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So you get a separate workflow, our ultimate flow to send an email, a separate one, to add a project member to the project as well as potentially schedule the event. This gives you the major advantage of building an event driven solution in our platform, because you can also trigger the action from code from your plugin from your plugin pipelines, so that you can have a Loosely coupled architecture and everyone.

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Both yourself team members, but potentially even other people that are working on the same environment can plug in Hook in to your application and plug in their own business logic to it. Now, let me show you how that works.

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First of all, what you need is you open the plugin registration tool and usually this is used by developers. So don't be scared, it's uh it's also valuable for makers, low code and the first thing you do when you connect to your organization, when you're logged in you'll see all of the plug-in assemblies that are available in your organization, we'll quickly switch out and do the display by message it's not necessarily better, but at least you see all the custom apis that are available, because this whole thing is based upon custom.

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Apis that you create you see, I, have a custom, API set up for cheap project created and there's also one. Let me scroll for expensive project created it's a plugin, um it's a it's! A custom, API and I know um plug-in registration tool. Brt is for developers mainly developer focused, but it's super easy to create your custom. Api and I know the documentation says that you have to add a plug-in to it, a plug-in assembly, so that when you call your custom API, it will execute some Pro code that is stored in a plugin.

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Now I'm cheating here a little bit because I don't want or need Plugin or custom code to be executed. I just want to throw the event, and apparently it's not required to associate in the slogan on the custom API. So the only thing I create is an event you give it the name. You give it an internal name, you give it a unique name. You give it a description. You see how creative I am when I prep demos.

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The important part here is I will register a new one. You do register and you do new custom API, so you give it a name. It'll fill this up, um you put it in a solution, let's put it. In my event, driven app and give it a description, you skip assembly and plug-in um this one is important, allowed custom processing step type because we want to hook into it.

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You will need at least to say that as async custom processing is allowed, because if you do none, they will not show up in power automate in the trigger, and you cannot hook into it. If you do sync and async, you can also attach a synchronous plugins to your custom API, so we'll make it async. Only binding type. Global is for bound or Unbound actions. Global means it's Unbound, it's not bound to an entity now, if you bound it bind it to an entity in our case project.

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Let me find my project, because this is the entity. This is it you can put in request parameters, so you say: what's an input so once you call this custom API that you provide some input values and you can define a response essentially for an event driven architecture. We don't really need the request and response form just registered like this.

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Now, if we, if it does it, come on D now it's hanging and potentially crashing so I'll just switch to power automate now, essentially, what I did in my first flow is when a rose added, modified or deleted, and the cost is higher than 10K I'm. Calling this perform about action so I do the actual performance, bond action, I select the table, and you will find the list of actions that are available on this table.

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The thing that I do is I associate calling this action because it binds to an entity to a record um to the row. Id from the renderer was added. So that's my Dynamic value when this action is called there is this other flow with the trigger when an action is performed? You select your catalog I do all, but there are some default catalogs for your custom web API. You can also create your own cataloging category.

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If you do it the way that I did in the plugin registration tool, everything will be under all, so you leave it to all categories well to all and table name being project, because that's where your action lives. Now here you select the action that exists. Expensive project created you notice. This is the trigger, is doing it with your display name performing a band action is happening with your internal name in the list.

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We all know. Consistency is hard um now, when connection is performed, this flow will trigger. So when this expensive project created action is triggered by our other flow, this flow will start as well. Same goes for my elderflow on sending in male only expensive project created. I can do it like this. So this way you can split up all the logic and everything in separate components you can hook into it.

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The way you want, and if you fill your application with many hooks like this, you can plug in custom business, business logic or you allow people to plug in custom business logic to your application. This is potentially interesting for isvs that create applications on Power Platform that sell them that distribute them as a managed solution. So you cannot add like edit them, because they come from the isv and they're managed, um but as an isv, you can provide ways for your customers to hook into your um their business business logic.

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If you look at the Run history for such um when an action is performed, you see that the output, when this is triggered, you get the ID that we provided for the project um that we filled in you get all the like: The Logical name of the entity on Widgets or the table in which it's triggered, and if you would Define input and output parameters, you will also get them on this message, which you then for sure can use in any way directions.

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So, even though this flow has no direct link to any of my child flows, it will still trigger multiple workflows, multiple power ultimate flows. The fun part is that by default there are already many available actions in Power Platform that you can also use. So if you need to plug in on something that happens on hooking on something that happens on account, let's hope it will actually do this.

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You can have the messages, the actions that are available on default um tables as well like merge, so you can plug in your business Logic on that as well.

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You will see that when you add your custom API to your solution, it will create the entries see. This is the one that we just recently created. It will create the resource uh in your solution, so the custom API is also uh solution aware and will be deployed from a solution to different environments, so it supports Alm the proper Alm practices to move from Dev test to production cool.

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So this was a very, very short intro in event, driven architecture and the custom um like when an action is performed trigger on dataverse, it's much more powerful than I first imagined it would be. So this is a totally different approach and it will for sure change the way that I will Design my applications in the future, so I hope I gave you some insights and some new ideas to work with your applications and I do think that Microsoft should be a bit more clear on what the value is for this Trader.

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So this was it from my site: I will or try to get my session selected on event driven architecture in multiple conferences in the future, so you can have a more Deep dive on this and not just a rush over thingy now. Thank you very much David over to you awesome. Thank you Yannick. This is. This is really useful and very powerful. Thank you for sharing.