Microsoft 365 Community Power Platform Connectors, 14 Jun 2022

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From YouTube: Getting stared with building Independent Publishing Connectors – Case Netherland Railroads

Description

In this 6-minute developer focused demo, Miguel Verweij shows his Microsoft Teams app that delivers information on train arrivals, departures, stations, and station disruptions accessed the independent publisher connector for accessing the Dutch railway operator’s open API. A Power Automate flow is triggered each afternoon to assess if commuter train is on time, notification delivered by a chatbot. See detailed article on creating a custom connector in Miguel’s blog. This PnP Community demo is taken from the General Microsoft 365 Developer community call recorded on May 26, 2022.

Demo Presenter
• Miguel Verweij (Sogeti) | @MiguelVerweij

Supporting materials
• Documentation - Nederlandse Spoorwegen (Independent Publisher) (Preview) | https://docs.microsoft.com/connectors/nederlandsespoorweip/
• Repo - Nederlandse Spoorwegen | https://github.com/microsoft/PowerPlatformConnectors/tree/dev/independent-publisher-connectors/Nederlandse%20Spoorwegen
• Blog - Power Platform Challenge 004 | https://www.powerplatformchallenge.com/challenges/2022/04/01/challenge-004.html
• Connectors - Welcome to the Independent Publisher Connector Directory! | https://github.com/microsoft/PowerPlatformConnectors/tree/dev/independent-publisher-connectors

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 - http://aka.ms/m365/community

A

Hello, hello, so um I will just briefly go through uh sort of the journey of creating a connector. This is me: if you want to contact me yeah, you can. I also have uh at the internet page, but I will get to that a bit later, but um I am located in the netherlands.

A

So it's the basically it's the the fifth country in the in europe based on population identity after these small countries. Yes, we have these kind of small countries in europe and if you look at the absolute numbers it it might not look as pretty high, but if you compare it to other countries like major economies in europe, you can see that the number is actually quite high. So um you also know that uh you probably know that at least the netherlands is famous for their cyclists right.

A

So you might think that a lot of people commute by bike to work, but actually that's just as you can see 6.7, so that's quite low, uh which was a bit stunning for me um and yeah. You would think that we have a pretty good train uh train connection, so you might think that's a that's a good alternative, but that's also pretty low still and uh also even in the netherlands, where everything is so close by and everything is in close proximity.

A

uh The car is still the predominant way of travel, so actually in the in this day and age, we would want the people to choose a train over a car every uh yeah every day, basically and based on personal experience.

A

I think that's already the case, so I would choose a train always over car, because I don't like traffic jams and that sort of stuff, but there are still two major downsides to train travels, which are they run at a specific time, and if the train is delayed or cancelled, you will have to wait like this man below on a train station.

A

What nobody wants to do right, so that was basically the the incentive for me to start developing a custom connector and once I heard that you could make it into an independent publisher connector that I could share with everyone. I thought: okay, let's give it a try, that's interesting. So what I did is I went online. This is like the dutch website. So this is the netherlands four-way, which is the the main railway operator in the netherlands, and they actually have an open api that you can use.

A

You can just create a free account there and then you can basically get an api token. All the documentation is here so based on that I first created a custom connector. So that's up here and here you can see that there are more operations in the in the documentation, but for my personal uh yeah use case, only these four were interested.

A

uh We don't have to go too too much into detail, but basically these are the four uh the four operations in there that's the custom connector and for an independent publisher, connector. You have to do some uh yeah a little extra to make sure that that it's in line with what microsoft wants you to to do so. Therefore, there's this uh the github repository from microsoft, you can get all the information there, there's also on the microsoft website that offers documentation.

A

But what you can see up here these are some of the things that you should add to it and that's pretty cool and then you can share it. So I can show you right now what I did so every day I for this scenario, I thought: okay, let's do the the amsterdam office it's in uh or the microsoft office, it's at hippo airport and I live in rotterdam.

A

So basically, if I would work on a microsoft office, I would go by train back home and then I want uh yeah at the specific time so the recurrence so every day this flow will run. I use the the independent publisher connector and then I get a message which says we can actually just go with directly. Oh, I need to test.

A

So what you can see, it's the now it's running, I get a notification, but it's every day runs. It uses the independent publisher connector. I do some data, yeah data, wrangling, sort of stuff, so just some cleanup stuff and then I post a message in a chatbot. So if, if we go here, you can see this is actually right now, so at 6 16 23 there is a trade coming and it's leaving from track. Five, that's what it says so instantly. I get a notification okay, so this is also sort of the trigger for me.

A

Okay, it's time to to pack my stuff and I know instantly uh at what time it's there. If it's delayed- and here you can see that sometimes it's at five, sometimes at six- and I know instantly it's at track five. So that's super convenient for me. So now I know. Okay, there are no delays. I can pack my stuff and directly go to the train station or, if there's a delay, I could maybe work a little longer and then wait for the delay to be resolved.

A

Another option is what can be done is uh nowadays with the new map functionality, which is pretty cool. We can also sort of make a a sort of a power, bi kind of uh look to it. So I can click here. So you see skipper airport, and here you can see, I can zoom in again a bit here. You can see all the all the departures from from that location and also the the the yeah the disruptions that are there at that moment.

A

So yeah, that's, basically what the connector does if you're interested in creating one for yourself. I mess this website. I keep a monthly blog or, like I make challenges, and the challenge for april was basically for these independent publisher connectors. So if you're interested, this is sort of like a guided tour to yeah to guide you through it, and I also highly recommend signing up for the microsoft 365 developer program that you get this uh this tenant for yourself, that you can basically do everything without any limitations from your organization yeah.

A

I think that's it from my side.

B

Awesome miguel: this is really really cool to see the creativity and ingenuity going into these publisher uh connectors, so well done to you. Thank you.