Microsoft 365 Community Power Platform Connectors, 18 Apr 2022

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From YouTube: Updates on Independent Publisher Connectors & Infura Ethereum Connector Demo

Description

In this 12-minute developer focused demo, Natalie Pienkowska reports there are 76 certified Independent Publisher Connectors in production, 42 in pipeline today! Sebastian ZolgInfura talks about the connector. Infura provides services to access the Ethereum Blockchain without your own Ethereum Node. This connector (one of the first with custom code) allows you to interact with Ethereum Blockchain JSON-RPC API through Infura. What is the Ethereum Blockchain, how communicate with it, 3 development challenges and how addressed inside the connector, and learnings summary. This PnP Community demo is taken from the General Microsoft 365 Developer community call recorded on March 17, 2022.

Demo Presenters:
• Natalie Pienkowska (Microsoft) | @NataliePienkow1
• Sebastian Zolg (Swisscom) | @sebastianzolg

Supporting materials:
• Repo - Infura Ethereum Connector | https://github.com/microsoft/PowerPlatformConnectors/tree/dev/independent-publisher-connectors/Infura%20Ethereum
• Connectors - Welcome to the Independent Publisher Connector Directory! | https://github.com/microsoft/PowerPlatformConnectors/tree/dev/independent-publisher-connectors
• Call – Power Platform Integration LABs call – last Wednesday of each month at 11am ET/8:00 am PT. Next call is on March 30th and the focus is on “triggers.” Join call at – aka.ms/PowerPlatformintegrationLABs
• Course – REST, RPC, and Distributed API Design | https://algodaily.com/lessons/rest-rpc-and-distributed-api-design
• Tools - Infura API - The World’s Most Powerful Blockchain Development Suite | https://infura.io/

Learn more:
• Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/m365pnp-videos

A

So I'm here to provide updates on the independent publisher, connector program, so for those of you who are not familiar with this essentially, this is a way to publish a custom connector to the power platform without actually having to own the api for what you're building the connector. For so these connectors, you don't have to actually download them, they're all certified by microsoft and available within power, apps power, automate and even azure logic, apps. So beyond the power platform, no downloads necessary.

A

As long as you have the premium license, you can access these, so just want to celebrate a couple of things. Today we have 76 connectors in production, four new ones since we spoke last week, so we had ai hw, my hospitals, connector by paul emojihub by troy, inferior ethereum by sebastian, who's going to be demoing today and word cloud by texfist, which is actually also by troy taylor.

A

And, of course, we have 37 outstanding publishers who have contributed by you know: building a connector collaborating with others, which we love to see when we see two people or more building a connector together and everyone's here learning together. It's awesome to see that for the next power platform, integration labs call, I think I briefly touched upon this last time, but I created an akms link for you all to sign up if you're interested the power platform integration, labs call is basically people coming together to learn, ask and build.

A

So we are doing a lot of demos and you know conversational topics on connectors gateways, data flows, essentially anything that has to do with integrations. The next call, which is the last wednesday of this month, is going to be on. The main topic is going to be on triggers so pulling triggers web hook triggers, especially if this is something you're interested in looking forward to having you all there and in terms of the connectors in our pipeline. We have 42.

A

Here are all of them here we got a couple of new ones this week, including national park service. um So it's definitely specific to the us, but it's awesome to see that, and we can now move on to the demo on inferior ethereum sebastian. Take.

B

It away that's cool. Thank you very much. Let me quickly share my screen and let me know if you see it: brilliant. Okay, let's kick this off! Thank you very much good morning, good afternoon, good evening. So whatever timezone you have, I hope you do well. Thank you all for allowing me to quickly present my work on the infuria ethereum independent publisher, connector. So that's quite a long name.

B

So don't expect me to say it too often my name is sebastian and I am a digital workplace architect for swisscom in switzerland, as the swiss part of the company name obviously indicates so if you haven't already feel free to contact me on linkedin, I'm more than happy to get to know new people. So before we look into the connector, I briefly introduced the ethereum blockchain and what's required to communicate with it.

B

Also we look at the challenges I have faced during the implementation of the custom connector and how I solved it, and then we go into a quick system demo and sum it up at the end, all right, let's do this. So what is the ethereum blockchain ethereum is an open source blockchain based distributed ledger.

B

It is powered by software running on a network of computers or notes that ensure data and programs also called smart contracts, are replicated and run on all computers on the network without essential intermediary, so ethereum can be used for sending and receiving cryptocurrencies and stable coins. Experience decentralized finance such as lending and borrowing trade, non-fungible tokens known as nfts these days and participate in online communities and decentralized autonomous organizations in short daos.

B

So essentially, every node talks to many other nodes and the api used in such a peer-to-peer distributed ledger world is different from what we microsoft folks usually expect. It's not a restful api, which complicates matters a bit. So instead, json rpc is used and json rpc is a stateless lightweight protocol.

B

It is transport agnostic in what the concept can be used over sockets over http or other ways. So, however, it is designed to be simple, but not necessarily intuitive, as restful apis and heavily relies on the documentation, as you may guess, that's not a perfect fit for a local platform such as the power platform with its generic connector approach.

B

So also, if you want to build apps on top of the ethereum blockchain talking to a peer-to-peer network is not very practical so for that some cloud providers expose json, rpc endpoints of the network as a single public api on the web, so that app developers can consume the network as a service.

B

One of those services is infura. Infurer api provides instant access over https to the ethereum network and therefore is a good entry point for traditional applications trying to communicate with the ethereum blockchain. So this is also how I built the first version of my connector for inferior and the ethereum blockchain due to the nature of json rpc. There were some challenges I had to tackle, since the power platform is very much focusing on rest, fuel apis and open api based services, and most of the ux relies on that fact as well.

B

Unfortunately, json rpc isn't made for that purpose, so we need to solve three unique challenges. First, json rpc has only one endpoint and no path templates. While we still need dedicated actions in the platform for a good ux, we need to route every call to the same url.

B

Second, the method to invoke is identified through a post body and follows the documentation instead of a standardized approach and the json rpc parameters can be named or positional and there is no exact pattern, so you need to decide on a per method basis and third, everything in the ethereum world is expressed as a byte string or a hex string. This is unusable for the average user, so the connector logic should convert from byte string to string or decimal values.

B

So let's look at how we solve the problem in the connector by walking through a quick demo, and for that I'm quickly. Switching to my other screen give me a second okay. Can you see the platform.

C

Flow load, it looks great yep.

B

Oh, brilliant, okay, so just a quick proof that the connector is really showing up in the platform, so you really search for infuria, theorem, independent publisher and let's uh pick the uh get balance, that's just to check how much if I do have, of course you can use it as as you, as you know how it goes you put in an ethereum address and with all of this, it's very simple, ux straightforward.

B

Of course you can do something like sending yourself a daily uh balance sheet, where you have your, if balance the current block in the connector or in the ethereum blockchain block number, and also the gas price, for instance. So that's basically it. This is very much straightforward. Okay, let's quickly! Look at the connector in here, um as I said before, we have to reroute everything to a single endpoint, and for that we can easily go for the routing policies.

B

This routes, the request to a single endpoint and, as you can see, there is inferior project id which is required to talk to the service um as a connection parameter. So this is the defined in the um api properties json file. So when you create a connection to this connector, it asks you for the project id you enter it and that's it. So every call is routed to this single endpoint.

B

Now the magic pops in when we talk about the custom code and as I understood from natalie, my connector is one of the first to use custom code as an independent publisher, connector and inside this connector we do all uh the heavy lifting so to say so we check for the different operations we do some.

B

According to the documentation, we have some patterns to convert stuff from byte strings to normal strings or decimal values, and I think this is a good example on how to use custom code to do the heavy lifting inside the connector and provide the best ux possible all right. So that's how I solved most of the challenges. Let's quickly look at what we can do now with the connector, so, for instance, we could build like a meta mask. Clone metamask is a well known wallet for the ethereum ecosystem. We just add the inferior connector in here.

B

The connection so- and it shows up in here and if I hit refresh it, should take a couple of seconds and until everything works, you can see I'm a really rich guy roughly about two dollars. So it's not that much, but this is how you can talk to the ethereum blockchain and, for instance, get your balance. Another use case, of course, is using it as a bot.

B

So what's the current gas price- and I think you can guess the response that should be the current gas price- that's basically how much a transaction on the ethereum blockchain costs right now, while this is a bit fixed for the demo, uh this value really comes from the inferior endpoint and is real time. So basically that's already it. So let me quickly jump back to the presentation.

B

A quick summary of my learnings so basically model any api as if it were restful regardless. If it is restful, so you have seen that for json rpc, one then use custom code and transform policies to translate in between when you are in doubt, I think ux should come over connector complexity. That's my personal opinion and my personal learning is bottom line. The power platform can talk to any api. This includes legacy or future systems such as the ethereum blockchain, and there is one last disclaimer.

B

The current version has a little bug in the deployment pipeline. Natalie and the team are on it. So please don't expect it to work right now, but it should work in the next couple of days and that's it from my side. I hope it makes all sense for you guys and yeah. I'm I'm here for questions. If there are any. Thank you.

C

Awesome sebastian and natalie both. Thank you very, very much we'll let those questions trickle into the chat but awesome, really really cool stuff and congratulations on being the first c connector in there. That is very, very cool. Thank you.