Microsoft 365 Community SharePoint, 10 Dec 2020

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From YouTube: Displaying progress of Power Automate Flows in your SharePoint lists

Description

In this 10-minute Developer-focused demo, Chris Kent shows an integration of Microsoft Power Automate with list formatting. Specifically, from within a list, request approval using a Flow. In the past to see details on a Flow required going to the Flows UI. Now link directly to the invoked Flow run from the list item. Flow run status is viewed on a hover. Delivers approval status to end-users and troubleshooting details on Flow run status. This PnP Community demo is taken from the General Microsoft 365 Development Special Interest Group (SIG) - Bi-weekly sync call recorded on December 10, 2020.

Demo Presenter: Chris Kent (DMI) | @theChrisKent

Supporting materials:
• Repo – Generic Flow Status | https://github.com/pnp/sp-dev-list-formatting/tree/master/column-samples/generic-flow-status

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

All right, everybody, hello, I'm chris! Let's talk about some formatting stuff all right today, we're going to talk a little bit about power, automate and some of the ways we can make that work a little better with flow. We've done that a number of times all right with the list. Formatting we've done that a number of times where we customize the button we customize the panel we'll show you both today we're going to focus in on a little trick.

A

You can use with power automate and then how you can tile that together nicely with list format. So, first off we head over to our classic warrior horse's site that we all have and now the warrior horses uh oftentimes. uh You know they're at battles, they're, murdering and killing and mayhem, and all that kind of thing, but they're, no stranger to bureaucracy right, so they've got their own set of approvals and everything else. So, even in the midst of battle, they need to submit their battle plans for approval.

A

So they've got this nice battle plans list because, generally, when you're in battle right, you've got the the sharepoint app or the you know. Some way to access sharepoint, so of course that's what they're doing here. So we've got our battle plans list come on over here, and here you see, we've got a couple of battle plans we'll zoom in slightly here right, so what they can do is they can request that approval.

A

So what we've done is we've attached the flow to this list, and again we've talked about that in previous uh videos, we'll link to those later uh and we've created a button. That'll launch those I'm going to show off this format and then we're going to talk about how we created all this all right. So we've got a button when we hit request all right, we'll see that uh comes over here. It's going to launch that flow panel, all right, so we've got our customized title here. Customize button, that's great!

A

We're ready to get we're ready to have our battle. Pan approved we're going to hit a it's going to go off. It's going to run kind of the background and it's going to start an approval process right now, a lot of times when you've got these approval processes right it'd be very helpful to communicate that status right. So we've got things like an actual status field right, but then we also have this kind of approval field. Now.

A

What we're going to see here is end users sometimes want to know exactly where things are right, who they need to go bug what's happening. How close? Are they, especially these guys, they're literally on a battlefield waiting for approval to launch their bombs right? So we've got a nice view here. So when you hover over it right, we can actually see you know kind of an outline, a little vizio type diagram of where we are in the process.

A

You can see we're at gate, 1 right and we can find out what's going on there now, if we take a look uh here, we also have this. Nice flow run details. Let's come back to that in just a moment. So if we take a look uh over here in my mail right, we should have a mail here. So we've got a nice approval.

A

Ryder comes in and says you know the details here, we're going to go and approve that and we're just going to submit that so we'll get that approved, and you notice that I didn't refresh the list. I didn't do anything else. So if we come back uh to our list right, it said pending gate 1 here in a moment should say pending gate two now, once that approval gets recognized um and the nice thing is again, we can just kind of keep this up there. It is pinning gate two.

A

If I hover over this right, we should see now we're at gate two right. You can see that nice yellow and that's really cool right. So as an end user. I can find out exactly how close I am to uh launching my battle plan or if I've been denied or not now, one of the things we've got here is and that's great right, but what, if I'm trying to troubleshoot this flow right?

A

It's stuck on gate 2, for whatever reason I mean flows are the easiest things in the world to create right right, never any problems.

A

So sometimes we want to troubleshoot things now in the past, when we've gone, sharepoint style, workflows right, you can, you can go to a list item, you can go see all the associated workflows with that item and you can go right in there flow- doesn't really offer us that right, so we can go to flow or you can see. We've got this flow here and refresh that we'll see our runs down here, uh which should just be the couple of them here right. So now we can see it's running now.

A

We can guess, because we just have the one running which entry. This is right, based on the time, uh but generally, when you're doing this you're going to have you know tons of these right and it's hard to find out which one applies to which specific list item right now we have to know it's this one, but what? If we had a way to link to that directly from the item? That's what this flow run details. Is you can see?

A

I've got a little note here requires flow ownership rights to access, but if I click that it's going to open up a new window, it's going to actually go directly to the run for that flow all right, so we can see the flow is running and we can actually see uh you know it's gateway approved and we come down here gate two approvals where it's sitting right. So we can see that now.

A

Obviously this is a lot harder to understand than our nice uh diagram here, which is again why we've done this, uh but we're allowing you to jump right into that flow run. So how do we do that? Well, let's take a look at our actual flow uh and one key portion to do that, all right, so, let's just head at it. So we can see this flow.

A

The key here and I've. I've pulled this from some blog some time ago was a long time ago, and I apologize. I don't remember where I got it, but the idea is here. I create this variable right. I use this initialize uh variable action and I'm just going to set this expression. Now this is going to be tough to read, let's see if we can pull it up, we'll show it a little more detail here in a few minutes. Actually, let's just jump to that. So we can see it a little better here.

A

It is all right. So the idea is we're just concatenating several strings together, all right, so we're pulling out. You know we're building a url to the flow run, all right, so we've just got our standard guy. Here then we're pulling out from the actual workflow itself, the environment name we're running in and we're just throwing on this. You know slash flow slash, giving the workflow name, slash, run, slash and then we're actually getting the instance here right.

A

So all of this builds a url that links directly to the run of the flow we're on right. So you can copy and paste this multiple times.

B

A

Of flows and it'll just take care of things for you, so what I'm doing then or is we're actually updating the item to set that status right? We want to set it to pending gate one and we've got this approval field. It's just a single line of text and we're just throwing that flow url in there. Okay. So that's what we're doing there to kind of save that to give us that quick jump right back into it. So now, if we take a look here, so how are we using that right?

A

So if we take a look at this format, you know we'll scroll over if we can keep it in mind uh by the way, I don't know if anyone's noticed, uh they're now supporting this. This is not the extension. That's doing this right, so this is just native out of the box. I'm getting uh some intellisense um everything right here in this box. It's no longer just a plain text box. So that's awesome right. It's actually using mono whatever it is the vs code stuff.

A

So if we come down here, we've got the execute flow right. So this is only happening when it's not started, so we get that button and you can see we're setting that header text and we're doing the run flow button text and we've got the id of our flow and that's what triggers that flow panel.

A

But after it started running, we don't want to show that anymore. So we no longer do that and we just do that with a simple uh there's: a style display right. If the status is not started, then you know put it as none, don't show it and then down here man. Can we make this box any bigger? Let's see if we can there, we go slightly bigger, uh we're going to skip ahead a little bit nice things. You got these nice collapsible sections now again, all out of the box.

A

Now right so now, we've got ourselves a div here. We're pulling everything and the key portion is this giant thing way down here, which is a giant svg object right and what I did was I just created this in inkscape and then I copied those paths out and then all I'm doing is I'm checking for certain ones of those squares right here.

A

If the status is pending gate, two then make it yellow otherwise make it gray, and you can see that's exactly what's happening here and then the final piece there is that uh run flow flow, run, details which will scroll way down here right past, all that svg fun.

A

uh We can see right here, it's just a link and it's being set to the current field, because this is the single text field that I wanted to use for that. So that's just that flow url we built inside our flow, and we set it here and we're just making a link out of it and that's all there is to that. uh Obviously, there's a quite a bit of complication in doing some of this, but it's a great way to provide both a status to your end users right.

A

So the horses that are on the field want to know what's happening, but also, if you want to troubleshoot or find that specific flow run later, you can jump over to that all right. So let's take a quick review on that. So again, here's this uh check the uh recording to get this a little better, we'll also publish that somewhere and then over here. So the key here with this display progress right is to keep in mind that flow url.

A

Don't just have it there because there's no way to security trim your format, unfortunately right now, which is why I put that little lock, icon and put a note there, because regular users are going to get an error when they try and go that if they don't have ownership rights on that flow.

A

Now, if you've set that as part of the list right, so you have the list owning it and they've got permission on the list, then you should be good to go all right, then that custom flow chart you can use vizio, so I'll, say it's possible sorta. I ran into a lot of trouble with that, uh but you can save a vizio as an svg format. Unfortunately, a lot of it is using uh features that are not supported uh directly by uh list formatting. This format. It really only supports paths.

A

So in your svg it's not gonna support rectangles circles, uh certain transforms, you know uh certain styles such as you know, line line endings and caps and stroke widths, and things like that. So there's a lot of massaging of that you're going to have to do, and so at some point it's easier just to get an open source thing like inkscape and just draw it right, so you can see I've just drawn it here. I just use gray and then I change those fills dynamically.

A

All right so make sure you check out the full documentation. There's quite a bit more things you can do. I even used one of the newer operations. There's a start with operation. uh For this you can check that out in the sample. We've got all of these samples, a hundred plus samples, including this one available here and that's all. We've got thanks a lot.

B

Thanks chris, it's I was just saying like it's not just anymore, this formatting magic is actually this formatting and flow magical. Almost so really cool super super useful. uh Why is this out of the box type of.

B