Microsoft 365 Community SharePoint, 26 Jul 2023

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From YouTube: Tracking workflow runs and errors using Power Automate and SharePoint

Description

In this 14-minute developer-focused demo, Jonathan Weaver suggests Approval Workflows do sometimes break. Here’s a Power Automate solution that tracks run failures enabling you to quickly fix and resubmit them. Log workflows in Power Automate using SharePoint or vise versa. Session covers why this solution, creating a Global SP Site/List, creating a Power Automate Flow, Scope Actions (containers in Power Automate), and getting workflow info. Review a workflow framework flow in Power Automate. Tips shared throughout.

This PnP Community demo is taken from the Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development Community call recorded on June 8, 2023.

Demo Presenter
• Jonathan Weaver (WaterOne) | @j_weaver74

Community Call Conversation
• aka.ms/June8-Demo2

Supporting materials
• Article - Workflow Logging | https://jonathanmweaver.wordpress.com/2023/06/05/workflow-logging/

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

A

B

Let's log some workflows and power automate using SharePoint or we'll log them in SharePoint, using power, automate, I'm, Jonathan, Weaver, here's my about me stuff, SharePoint, Power, Platform, Dev, I've, been doing workflows and whatnot for a long time on black belt becompo. Here's my contact information feel free to contact me.

B

So what are we going to talk about? First of all, we're going to tell you I'm going to tell you why we're doing the solution in the first place, which is because in January we had a Microsoft outage broke some of our management of data fields and that started a bunch of workflows that were breaking but I didn't know they were breaking until the users told me: hey I. Have this approval but I never got a request to approve it.

B

We're now, five months in working on fixing that and in the meantime, I've created this solution as a real, quick way to track all of the approval, workflows and and other workflows, but specifically saving them into SharePoint into a list with links back so that I can quickly identify what's broken and quickly go back and find them fix them.

B

Resubmit them so we're going to look at a global SharePoint site and a list we're going to create a power automate flow, we're going to use scope, actions, I love these scope, actions, they're, basically, containers inside of power, automate or power, yeah, Power automate and we're going to use the get workflow information to be able to track the exact workflow run so Global site every SharePoint environment, I work in I create some sort of a global site. In the old days we had, we had parent child relationships.

B

So if you put a site or a list at the the parent level, all of the child sites, all of the subsites could access that information, which is which was great until Microsoft, said we're not doing that anymore. So now we all know with the flat architecture. You can't in a SharePoint list reach over to a SharePoint list in the different site collections. So instead we have to use powerapps power automate, so I create a global site, I like to call it global data.

B

You do you whatever works for your company or your clients, and then inside of that I create a workflow history list. It's also that work from home list yeah. You do you again um inside of this list. I have just some basic basic columns. We've got a title. We've got a start time end time timeout. We all know that the power automate flows time out after 28 days, and we know if you've got an extensive approval process and you've got directors and and managers and VPS who have thousands of emails a day.

B

They lose their approvals, they might not get to it within 28 days. So we need to be able to identify which workflows are going to time out soon and uh ping. Those people and say, hey, get on it and we have an outcome field. Did it fail? Did it succeed? Did it other um a link to back to the flow run? Did you know you have? You can have a link that goes straight to the exact flow run that that this item ran against.

B

um You don't have to go, find the workflow and then inside the workflow scroll through your 37 flow runs that happened yesterday and find the one that is the issue. I have a resubmitted field, it's a yes! No, if you work on a team, this is imperative, because, if I go back and resubmit, the workflow I'm going to mark that as done so that one of my team members doesn't come in and say: oh, this needs to be done still and resubmit it again.

B

um That really ends up causing service tickets. When directors and managers and VPS get multiple approvals for the same thing, an item info field- this is just a unique it's a field to identify unique information about the specific item. Helps you identify it more quickly. In addition, you'll see two below that. An item link a link back to the exact item that that the workflow is run against and and of course, a workflow name, so that you know which workflow you're working with, um and that is particularly useful for grouping sorting filtering.

B

You might have the same workflow that breaks a lot, because people forget to put a name into the approver field, and so the approval action breaks, no problem. We we know exactly which workflow it is. uh We can and we've got the links to go right back to it.

B

So you'll see I've got the whole demo in the slides and then I'll show you again in real life. So what is the workflow framework? Look like so I put these pieces into every approval workflow that I build. So this workflow is a manually triggered workflow. It would be called get approvals for the thing um I add in my approval or my logging information, which is um you can see the initialize string uh called item info.

B

That's that unique, identifying information I like to put in things like the the ID, the title, uh maybe an employee name, if it's a say, a travel request, or if it's approvals, maybe you put in the approver's names into this this field, so you can identify it really quickly.

B

Now here's where we get into the Scopes you notice, I have I, have four scope. Actions here: I have this one called actions right here in the beginning, this is the meat and potatoes of your workflow. This is all the stuff that happens at the end once that action has either succeeded or failed. It jumps down here to these other two Scopes I've got a result for on success and I've got a result for on failure and you'll notice very important. This red dotted line Arrow right here.

B

If you have not set your configure run after to has failed, it will get through this action. It will come down, it will say: oh I succeeded, oh and I also failed and then you're going to spend 20 30 minutes trying to go through the meat and potatoes of your workflow, trying to figure out what failed and then at the end, you're going to feel really dumb when you realize it's because you forgot to set that run after we'll.

B

Look at that in more details um that log workflow history inside of that and it's a scope inside of a scope- and these are great. These little containers and the beauty of the containers is a you can shrink. You can expand and compress those so that you can see more on the screen, but also when you're, creating a new workflow and you're using the same same actions over and over.

B

Instead of having to copy all four of these actions, I can copy this one scope, action and it will bring all four of the actions with it. I love. It saves me a ton of time, so here's the steps that I do specific to the history. To this.

B

This exact use case I have a convert time zone because we all know the time ends up being in UTC and most of us don't live or work in UTC um get workflow information, that's a compose action and it's literally just workflow parentheses, parentheses, parentheses inside of an expression, and what that does that gets all of the information about this exact workflow run that you can then use this big ugly, concat statement on the left and throw that into an expression in the workflow run, URL compose statement and that's going to be the link to this exact flow run and then I have just your basic SharePoint create work, workflow history item where you're going to use all of these pieces of information to create the list item inside of the list, all right, jumping down once again inside the result on success and on failure, you've got an update, work, workflow, history item and that basically says that's where we put the end time in that's where we put the completion, is it succeeded?

B

Did it fail the outcome and you know never hurts to throw an email out there that tells your user that it completed, that it succeeded. It failed and once again you notice I've got it's very important that you have this red dotted line arrow and not a black, solid Arrow right here and I'll show you how that works in the demo. So slideshow is done. That's me, that's my blog! That's my email Twitter hit me up. If you see me, live at a conference, uh ask me for a sticker.

B

I've got a dojo dude sticker I've also got whiteboard MVP stickers if you like, Microsoft whiteboard. So let's go demo real, quick all right. So here's my work, my workflow history, workflow, should look familiar. It's exactly what was in that picture.

B

You manually trigger a workflow for the sake of demo. We won't have time to actually run the workflow, but I'll show you the outcomes of it. I always tell people when you're using SharePoint, especially if your trigger is on a new item, but also if it's on a modified item always always use a get item right after it, and anything that you do in the rest of the workflow should be pointing back to that. Get item never point back to your trigger, because the trigger changes the trigger can change.

B

If you need to change your trigger, you need to delete it. You lose all of your stuff from from below, but if you just choose the get item and everything below it all the dynamic values. Point back to your get item: all you have to change is the ID, that's it! So that's my my piece of information for that.

B

So here's my item, information again, I said I. Like the idea in the title, the idea is unique. You know it's Unique, it has to be. The title usually is, is important again I'll put like an employee name or the approvers in this case, jump on down to the actions.

B

We've got the scope action right here and if you haven't seen a scope action, if you haven't used one I highly recommend checking them out again: they're just containers scope. It's right here, scope control! You put that in you put all your actions inside of it and then you can use it as a container.

B

So what do we have? We've got the log workflow history scope convert time zone. That's your basic put into UTC! Now tell it what format you want, what time zone you need it to be in get workflow info? This is exactly what it looks like it's an expression that just workflow parentheses parentheses and it gives you all the workflow information workflow run URL. So this is where we have that big ugly concat statement that I showed you in the PowerPoint and then we have the create work.

B

Workflow history item um see: I could put the on cat for the title up here. I just use the title of the workflow and the output from the convert time zone. For me that works great for you. You might need something different um start time. Utc now just needs to be right now for the timeout I told you that's like I do 28 days.

B

um I know, there's you know might be 30 days, but I'd rather catch it early than catch it late. So we're just you doing an ad days. uh The flow run is the output from the workflow run. Url uh compose statement up top resubmitted. Make sure you default that to no.

B

If you default that to yes, then everything shows that it's been resubmitted, and you know no one knows what to do with it uh and yes uh per the the chat comment set variable um you can do it I believe you can do a set variable. You cannot do a initialized variable inside of a scope for sure, and then we have that stir info the item info right here and the name of the workflow so that you can sort and filter and the link to the item.

B

And then you do all of your approval stuff. At the end, it's going to either succeed or fail got your results on success, got your result on failure and for those of you who haven't used the configure run after it's right here. You click the three dots configure run after and make sure that the failure one says has failed all right and then real quickly. Here's the output list. This is my workflow history list. You can see. I've got one that failed. I've got one that succeeded, here's my flow run.

B

So this this link takes me right back into Power. Automate takes me directly to the flow run for that flow, so I can fix it and resubmit it and item information, the workflow name and, of course, I like I love that we can group and filter by this one and then a link back to the exact item back in the in the actual approval process. Whatever the SharePoint list is for the approval process, so that's it in a nutshell: uh there's a blog post out that has all of this information.

B

Dave posted the the link to it as well, and feel free to reach out to me. If you have any questions, that's it.

A

Very, very cool stuff, thanks Jonathan, very very cool I, really really appreciate how useful this is and using the different Technologies together again love the Better Together scenarios that everyone's bringing together today excellent job.