Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 18 Jan 2023

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From YouTube: Mention a bot from a Power Automate flow

Description

In this 13-minute citizen developer-focused demo, developer Dennis Goedegebuure shows how to mention a bot in a flow from Teams. Use these building blocks – Power Virtual Agent, Microsoft List, Microsoft Team and channel, and a Power Automate cloud flow that triggers on a key word (#FAQ) and posts a message with a bot mention @mention bot from Teams Channel. Flow monitors the channel. The Power Virtual Agent is published to Teams as an app.

This PnP Community demo is taken from the Microsoft Power Platform community call – January 2023, recorded on January 18, 2023.

Demo Presenter
• Dennis Goedegebuure | @expiscornovus

Community Call Conversation
• aka.ms/Jan18-Demo2

Supporting materials
• Article - Call a Teams Chatbot via a Power Automate Flow | https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-PVA-chatbots-in/Call-a-Teams-Chatbot-via-a-Power-Automate-Flow/m-p/1614413
• Documentation - Reply to a message in a channel | https://learn.microsoft.com/graph/api/channel-post-messagereply
• Blog – Expiscornovus | https://www.expiscornovus.com/
• Samples – List Formatting Samples | https://pnp.github.io/List-Formatting/

Stay connected
• Twitter https://twitter.com/microsoft365dev
• Call attention to your great work by using #PowerAppsCC and #PnPWeekly on Twitter.

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/m365/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/m365/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community Blog - https://aka.ms/m365pnp/blog
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - https://aka.ms/m365/community

👋 Join to our weekly Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Community calls to learn more. These are PUBLIC calls for you to get access on the latest details from Microsoft and to see awesome demos from community on these technologies - Download recurrent invites from https://aka.ms/community/calls

A

B

Talking about last names and pronunciation, that's probably a difficult one for a lot of people um and my handle on Twitter and all the social is export novice and another one for pronunciation, and today I'm going to talk about mention about from within the flow.

B

um So so, first of all uh something about me, um I'm, an I.T consultant I work at Ultima in Reading, UK, I'm, actually Dutch, so I moved to the UK four years ago and I primarily like to help out people with their I.T challenges. So that's what I'm doing as work, but that's also what I'm doing in my free time uh other things which I'm doing in my free time is running I like running um I'm, a gamer and I also like to cook, which obviously helps with Family Life and uh yeah.

B

Besides that I'm also, a super user and I recently became a business applications MVP, so I'm pretty proud of that.

B

um As a super user. I constantly help out on the power usage forums.

B

um I really like that, like I, said, I would like to help out people, but um I also learn a lot about that, and today is something I'm sharing. I'm sharing something which I learned from that Forum, so um a person called himachi, hopefully I pronounce. It correctly asked about how to mention a Bots from flow in teams. So this this whole solution is based around that question.

B

So I looked into that I did some research I reflected a couple of polls from the graph API and I came up with this solution which I'm today presenting to you guys. So what is it made of? um It? Has a couple of building blocks first of all, I built and published a power virtual agent, second of all, I created a listing in in sharepoints, which is uh holding information about frequently asked questions and I applied some few for formatting to it.

B

Thirdly, I created a team and a channel because obviously I wanted to mention the bot from that channel and, lastly, I created a flow which monitors that channel and which, whenever uh the hashtag FAQ keyword gets mentioned, then uh this this flow will get triggered and it will mention obviously the bolts and then, lastly, oh and that's always with these kind of solutions, I've tested it loads of times because, obviously, at the first try I didn't succeed. So it was testing, testing and more testing.

B

Obviously this is a live demo, so it not always works. So let me first of all show you how it should work, so I've recorded an animated gif, um as you can see in here, I posted that I have a question: hashtag FAQ and then what you see is I reply to that with a message and a message is: has the the topic trigger of the power of virtual agents and that's when the bot kicks in with a response? So that's how it should work.

B

So let me switch to My Demo environment to show you in real life, um so, like I mentioned before it has a couple of components so, first of all uh the power of virtual agents that agents.

B

So this is the the power of virtual agents, um it's just uh a straightforward one and what I did is in within the power future agents. I created a topic called FAQ example topic, and that topic only has two actions or two components: a trigger phrase. So can you show me the FAQ question mark and a response from the Bots, which is here's the link to the FAQ?

B

So if you would test that it would.

B

It would look like this, so it's it's pretty basic setup.

B

um What I did with this power future agencies, I published it and I, published it to the Microsoft teams Channel or to Microsoft teams as an app and yeah? That's that's about it and what's important from this when you after you've set this up, is that you uh record a couple of details. You will need that later down the line for the for the power ultimate flow, so one of the things which you should take a note of is the name of the bolt which is pretty straightforward. Faq pulls, but also this old app ID.

B

So that's really important for the ad, mentioning part of things so be sure to copy and paste that so that's the first part uh the power of virtual agents. The second part is the list itself, so I can actually click on it and just navigate to that. So the second part is again a pretty straightforward list. So it's it's all around the scenario of sharing FAQ questions and answers. So hopefully, that's zoomed in correctly, so it has a title, column, question and answer and a category so yeah.

B

This looks pretty nice, but what I did is I also applied some formatting to it. So you can see that here in the FAQ per category View, so this shows like an accordion kind of style. I I didn't figure this out on my own I just used a great resource and that resource is the PNP GitHub. I o list formatting samples, database or sites. So if you go to that, you have all these few samples, and one of them is the FAQ accordion.

B

So credits where credits is you um that's from unknowns, but the villain, hopefully I, pronounced that correctly. So yeah just pick so just have a look at this Json and apply it to it.

B

um So that's the second part of the of that mentioning um the third part yeah, it's a pretty simple part: that's creating a theme, so the team is just again um a Microsoft team team with an additional channel. So in this instance I create a bob mentioning Channel and that's it no special uh configuration for that.

B

So that's part, number three and part number four is the the flow itself. So that's where yeah, the the most interesting part for me came into play. So um again, let me zoom in so this flow has several steps. um So the first step is the Trigger action. The when a new channel message is added um Trigger action and that action has a couple of conversations. So, first of all, it's looking obviously at the team.

B

I just showed you and it's also looking into new messages within the bot mentioning Channel, but we don't want to regulate every single time, because people can type a lot of different type of messages. So what I did is I included a trigger condition, and you can actually already see that here in the notes.

B

So what I'm doing is I'm using an index of function and that index of function is looking for the the hashtag FAQ string within the body body contents fields and it checks if that value or if that's the output of the index of function, is equal to -1 I, don't know if you're aware, but if an index one outputs -1, it means it hasn't, found the keyword you're looking for the string value, we're looking for and we want to have the reverse output of that. So that's why I'm putting a knot around it so effectively?

B

What I'm saying is expression is if I haven't found.

B

um Faq yeah I want the opposite of that. So if I found FAQ then trigger this flow. So that's where this trigger condition. Expression comes into play for the people who haven't used that you can add that here in the settings, so that expression is added here in this area.

B

So that's the first part how to trigger this flow and after that um I'm gonna, reply to the message and I'm doing that by using a Samsung HTTP request, action from The, Office, 365, connector and that action is consumed is using the reply to a channel message. Graph, API methods, um there's documentation about that. So in the graph API documentation, you can find it how you can construct such a a request.

B

So, as you can see in here, the team, ID, HTML, ID and a message ID are needed and you can post things like content and other types of properties.

B

So with a bit of reverse engineering, I've figured out that it was possible to obviously reply to it to that message, but it was also I also figured out that you need this ad sign to do mentioning.

B

You need a book name, and if you use that ads that add tag, I should say, then you can refer to your Bot by using this application in the mentions section. So in here you can see an application section and here's that app ID I referred to earlier so um yeah I store it in some variables in here. So in here that here's that same ID, but that's the way how I figured out how you could mention uh a bots. So hopefully I still have some time.

B

Let me try and see if it works now as a real live demo. So where can I find the #faq.

B

Okay, hopefully it's clear, let me zoom in a bit again and normally, as you can see in in previous demos, yeah it took about one to two minutes before that trigger kicked in, but in essence now that flow is looking for this keywords and whenever it found it yeah, it should reply with this.

B

So hopefully, like I said we still have some time left for that to wait for that.

A

Yeah you're good, no problem; okay, it's really really slick, Dennis, very cool.

B

Yeah last time, like you can see here, it's two three minutes. So hopefully it's now a bit faster here. It was one minute so I'm not sure if it's like uh five minutes batch job kind of thing in the background that it's not actual actual.

A

Real time it knows we're all watching, so it's like I want my time in the uh I want my time.

B

But yeah I was uh looking back at this. This is like I created this seven months ago. Yeah, probably you cannot I've seen like a chat, GPT connector. So probably you can also includes those kind of connectors in this process as well, but so this is yeah still pretty static, but yeah I already have some new ideas for this: oh yeah there it is so now you can see. I mentioned the bolts, and now the bolt also responds with its own response, because I mentioned it so yeah, that's it.

B

So um let me go back to my presentation so yeah, that's it. um If you have any questions, yeah feel free to uh mention me or contact me on my socials and otherwise yeah I'm, always on the power usage Forum. So mention me on there as well. Thank you.

A

Awesome awesome, awesome, stuff Dennis. This is really really cool and and just I love again, both both demos so far today have the Better Together storyline to them using multiple Technologies, just warms my heart to see that because that's just real life, so thank you so so much Dennis.