Microsoft 365 Community Power Platform Connectors, 13 Oct 2022

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From YouTube: Introduction to Fantasy Premier League Independent Publisher Power Platform Connector

Description

In this 20-minute developer-focused demo, Joe Unwin steps you through the process: Power Automate Independent Connector requests information, FPL responds to the request passing back JSON, Power Automate Independent Connector receives data & sends to Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Teams receives data and displays message to users. Go deep on how to organize and manipulate returned data. Call a Microsoft Teams action to render data in a Teams chat or channel. The connector has 7 actions today. This PnP Community demo is taken from the Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development Community call recorded on October 13, 2022.

Demo Presenter
• Joe Unwin (Hitachi Solutions) | @Flow_Joe_

Supporting materials
• Documentation - Fantasy Premier League (Independent Publisher) (Preview) | https://learn.microsoft.com/connectors/fantasypremierleagueip/
• Repo - Fantasy Premier League Independent Connector | https://github.com/microsoft/PowerPlatformConnectors/tree/dev/independent-publisher-connectors/Fantasy%20Premier%20League
• Article - Fantasy Premier League (FPL), Power Automate & Microsoft Teams | https://www.flowjoe.io/2022/10/13/fantasy-premier-league-fpl-power-automate-microsoft-teams/

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

B

So yes I'm here to talk to you about the Fantasy Premier League, independent connector that I've created, um but before that, let's just touch on who I am my name is Joan Nguyen I'm, also known as flojo in the community I'm a Microsoft MVP and MCT I work at Itachi Solutions. This is a solution, architect and CE training lead and if you need to contact me for any reason about flow or anything like that, contact me at flojo, outlook.com or visit my blog at www.flojo.io.

B

Okay, so, firstly, we should really touch on what is the Fantasy Premier League. So if there's anyone on this call, that has no idea what I'm talking about. It is essentially a fantasy football league that you can pick a squad of players. You can buy and sell um each of them each week uh you get one free transfer. You get deductive points.

B

If you um do more than that, you can then get points based on how your team performs and then you get a total of weekly points and that gets added to your total points and then each game week, your leaderboard's, updated so whoever's doing best with the most total points will be at the top and whoever's doing worse will be at the bottom and then at the end of the season.

B

The highest point team wins that's relatively simple, but it's super popular there's over 10 million users worldwide and um even at my own company Hitachi we've got over 20 people playing in our little league Okay. So why did I create this? Well? Firstly, I created it to Hitachi, simply because uh we have this chat and everyone's talking about what's going on, but you have to go on to the website and get the information and you're.

B

Looking at that solo right, we wanted to build camaraderie within the team, especially as we're all remote workers, so I created a custom. Connector and I was posting all of the information about our league into the chat every Monday morning for a recurrence on Flow and then I decided to essentially build it out, build more features and make it into an independent connector, because that's a great thing about the independent connector initiative is that any custom connector that you create. You can then build out, submit it to GitHub and it can be used for everyone.

B

um So let's look at the process then well. What we're going to be doing, then, is we're going to be looking at how power will automate independent connector requests the information?

B

The information is going to be requested from the Fantasy Premier League they're, going to respond with um to our request with uh information based in Json, then we're going to receive that information in power automate, manipulate it and then send it to teams, and then teams will receive that data and display the message to the users. So what can we actually do with this independent connector? We have multiple different actions. We have the classic League standing action.

B

The classic League standing action essentially allows you to get all the information on your league, and this is what the majority of people use if they use this connector. This is what I use all the time, but then you have fixtures, so you can get like upcoming fixtures previously played fixtures. You can get like the score results from teams that have just played Etc.

B

You have game week live data, so you can get all the information about that particular game week. You get general information such as team of the week and how what what people have been transferring in and out. You also have like basic manager.

B

Information such as like the manager is a user and you get to get their first name last name: team names, the links that are in uh you also get the history of a manager which allows you to get breakdowns of their like previous years, play the transfers that they've made it's more specific information and then I've also added a player's detailed data action that allows you to pull data on specific individuals.

B

So if you wanted to find more information about your favorite player and how they're doing you could provide their ID and then you can pull that information?

B

Okay, so let's jump straight on to power automate and have a look. um What we are going to be doing, firstly, is I'm going to be building out a flow that essentially grabs the league information passes it to Microsoft teams and I'll. Show you how relatively easy it is. But what I'll do as well, because we're limited on time is I'll go into a more complex flow that I've created to show you how complex you can get with this type of stuff and or get all of the information that you require.

B

So let me just delete this, as this was just.

A

B

Template um so what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to type Fantasy, Premier, League and I can select the independent, published connector and then I can select the classic League standings. Now all you need to do here is provide a league ID. Now, how do we find that League ID? So if I jump over to my team doing relatively okay- um and you can see all the information about your team here but down at the bottom- you have the classic leagues now I'm not signed in. So all of this information is public.

B

um So if I go to the Hitachi All-Stars league, for example, you can see that we have all of the information about the individuals, the game week scores and the total scores, but at the top in the URL we have fantasy.premierleague.com leagues, slash an ID. Now that ID is what you want to copy and then, if we go back to our flow and paste it in here, what that's going to do, then, is that's going to pull the information on our league.

B

So let's just run a quick test on that and see what information we get back.

B

Okay, so, as you can see super fast, uh you get all of the data back in Json uh once it loads yep, okay, so you can see, we've got the name of the league we've got when it was created. We've got all of the information if it has a cup and and so on, and then we've got all of the information, as you can see on here, such as the rank, the team name, the person name game week, um the total score.

B

We've got all of that information in here as well, plus more so we can actually get more information than the actual website is displaying to us now. What this allows us to do, then, is this allows us to manipulate the data that we get back and set it up to make it into a nice and easy readable way um before we send it to Microsoft teams.

B

So the next thing we're going to do is simply create a HTML table.

B

And we're going to pass in the information now, if you haven't seen this before I've got um if in settings the power automate settings, I've got the experimental features on, because what this does is it gives you this nice, larger area for dynamic values and expression box. So, if you're looking to get a bigger expression box, that's how you can do it.

B

So what you can do, then, is I'm going to select the classic League standing results and then in here, I'm going to open advanced options and I'm going to customize the columns, because I want to get specific information. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to set position as my first header and then I need to select the actual Dynamic data that I'm going to be using so I know that the dynamic data is rank, so we've got last Rank and then we've got the classic. Just the current rank the current position.

B

So what I'm going to then do is do previous, so we can see who's actually either gone up or gone down. So if I just write rank in here again and do last Rank and then what I'm going to do is uh the name of the actual individual.

B

So this is going to be player, name and then I'm going to do total to get the actual total score.

B

And then I'm going to get the um this week's tutorial.

B

Okay, so then, now what we've done then, is we've essentially created a table and um pulled all of the information that we want to display into our teams.

B

We want to display the position, the previous position, the current player name, the total score that they've actually got and then the actual score that they've got this week because at Hitachi, for example, I have this running every Monday morning at 7am Eastern, so that everyone can come into work and see be really happy that they've got um they've, moved up on the league or uh not so happy because, unfortunately, someone's overtaken them. So let's have a look at this. Then, let's just run this and see what we get back from our HTML table.

B

Okay cool, so, as you can see here, information is split up into a nice easy to read table now. We know that, for example, myself this week, I'm in rank six last week, I'm in rank seven Mr Tabor was ranked six last week, but he's now moved down to rank seven because I had a good week. I've got my total points here and the amount of points that I've got during that week. So then we need to get this into Microsoft teams.

B

Okay. So how do we do this? Then we can simply use the Microsoft teams um uh action and we can post to a chat or Channel now, depending on how you want to set this up in your teams, you can either have it in a Channel or like us. We have just a chat with everyone in it. um You can also post to that right. So if we select uh float bot and then we can select the actual chat that we want to go into.

B

This will then be able to go into our particular channel here. um For some reason, my chat's not showing up not entirely sure why? um uh Let me delete that and try again.

B

Interesting for some reason my uh I don't know why, but it's not my message: Channel isn't showing up, but anyway, what I can do is I can just jump straight over to my other flow. So now, we've gone from basically creating the HTML table and posting it into teams to building out a HTML table for our our league exactly the same, but we've now gone into fixtures.

B

So how this works then is I want to go through the fixtures I want to get the latest fixtures so I want to get the latest results from our events. So we've got, for example, Nottingham Forest versus Aston Villa was the last game. I want to get the last three, for example. So what I can do then is I can call those fixtures, but what I'm doing at the beginning is I'm, creating an array of team names. So why am I going through this and arranging these team names?

B

Well, if you go on to Wikipedia, you can just copy a list of all of these team names and what I've done then is I've pasted this into Excel and, as you can see, we've got 1 to 20.. Now the Fantasy Premier League doesn't actually send you a team name back. They send you a team number. They must be keeping their um key names on the database somewhere that they call in that we don't actually have access to. So this is how you can get around situations like. That is that you can create an array.

B

You add a string array of all of these teams and obviously an array is base of zero, so Arsenal would be zero. Aston Villa would be one Etc. So if we get one through for arsenal, we need to minus one from that to get the team name from the array. So I can go into them fixtures. They call the fixtures and pass in the Json. All I've done is I've run this previously copied the result back from there and generated a sample from it, and then I'm filtering my array.

B

Now, what I'm doing in this filter array is that I'm, using the and because I'm doing two different filters and I'm saying that I I'm using the not equals kickoff time, is null because team games get moved.

B

Sometimes they don't kick off for whatever reason they get canceled, so I don't want to receive any of those I just want to receive the games that I've played so I'm, putting a not equals kickoff time of null, as well as I'm doing an equals of finish, because I only want the games that have been played, because this gives you every single fixture. So I only want the games that have actually been played.

B

Then um what I've got here is I'm going through and sorting the array. Now. This is a new. um This is a new function. That's been added called sort and I'm just passing through the output of my filter array and I'm sorting by the kickoff time now. The ascending kickoff time goes from oldest to newest, so I need to then wrap that in a reversal, I get the newest on top and then I'm going to essentially use the function called take and get the last three results.

B

So I'm just passing the output, comma, 3 and then taking uh the free results that I want and again I'm passing the output into there and building up a table. Now this table, then, is built up with the home team name, so I'm going to have the home team name their score, the score of the away team, then the away team name and then the time that you actually took place.

B

Now, as I mentioned previously, we've got a variable on top of FPL names and then what I'm doing is I'm using the subtraction function and passing in the team number that they are giving me from this data from the fixtures and then I'm subtracting one from it, so that we get to the base of 0 for the array and I'm passing that in the square brackets. So then it will pull the name from our array rather than having to have a number, and no one knows what the number is right.

B

So then, we'll get a a name through we'll get a team score through then we'll get the name of the away team, then we'll get the kickoff time and then so that's what this is. What you should be should have seen in the last flow is that we have the Fantasy Premier League group chat and what happens then is we use the float bot posting group chat, Fantasy, Premier League. What this is going to do, then, is it's going to post on behalf of the user.

B

That runs it so it will say flow bot on behalf of Joe onwin, for example.

B

Then I'm just populating the message right so I'm doing FPL ranks at and I'm just using a format date time, UTC now I'm pulling in the full day, so it would say Thursday now, for example, and then I'm just doing the date so month date year, I'm putting the output of our table that we was creating previously on the previous flow, with the position. Previous name total this week, Etc and then I'm doing latest outputs of the latest matches and I'm passing that into here for that output.

B

So, let's run this then and I'll show you what it looks like in Microsoft teams.

B

Okay, so these have run in parallel. That's why we've got the two different bits here and our tables have been created. uh You can see the table here as well as all of the filtered table here. So we've got the last three results: we've got not enough for us to Assassin Villa Everton versus Man United and Arsenal vs Liverpool. This one I'm particularly happy about um then we post to the uh channel.

B

So this is what happens then, um is that we now have a nice easy to read: table get post to our Fantasy Premier League chat. We have all of the information based on the positions, the previous, the name, the total um and the this week's total. And then you can see the latest results here, the time that they were played in BST and we essentially have all of the information to it. But um let's just jump back to here now.

B

Obviously I'm doing this as a manual trigger and as I mentioned previously in Hitachi. What we've got is we've got a recurrence weekly uh Monday morning, 7 A.M, so you can have this flow run every week. So before you come in comes into your chat, you have all the information there ready for you to go and discuss if you have done well or not, and I had done relatively okay this week, so I was relatively happy, but I was super happy that Arsenal beat Liverpool.

B

A

B

The end of the presentation I'm going to now just jump over to a review slide here and just go through what we've actually seen. So what have we actually seen? Then? We looked at how easy it was to gather League information, create a table from that information and send that information to your team's chat I'm, not entirely sure why um the action wasn't. Picking up my chat at that particular point. I'll have to have a look into that. Maybe I selected the wrong action from the excitement of doing this presentation.

B

Then we also saw how you can get more complex. Now I was manipulating a lot of data. I was filtering, it I was essentially cleaning the data that I wanted and then I was taking specific information and building up a actual table a HTML table before sending it to teams. You can get really complex with the data that you have or you can do it really easy.

B

If you just want the league information displayed directly into your teams, I want to just highlight other connectors that I've created I've created the Dexcom, continuous glucose monitoring, connector that essentially I'm Type 1. Diabetic so I have a continuous glucose monitor. It monitors my blood sugar every day, every five minutes actually and it sends information to a website. Now parents can't uh like they they may want access to what their kids are doing. It gets sent to your mobile device.

B

What you can do is you can then pull that information via the power automate and the Power Platform, and essentially have a look at that right, have a look at uh uh blood sugar levels and and so on. Obviously it should be. This isn't a I'm not saying this is a specific medical thing that you should be using, but it's a very interesting to like get averages and and so on, and then I've done a jira extension as well. That essentially builds upon what was already built on Parallel to me.

B

And lastly, if you want to see any more from me check out, www.flojo.io I go much more into in-depth into how we build out that fixtures section so I know we had to go through that relatively quickly. Okay, so I'll hand back to you, David awesome.

A

Thank you, you're, very, very cool love, how you're integrating some team chemistry using the technology and how extensible it is to also use in other areas of business, so very, very cool. Thank you. um I know, there's some questions and comments in the chat I'll. Let you look at that in the interest of time, foreign.