Let’s imagine that you’re a member of the Strategy and Planning team at Contoso (the world’s largest imaginary corporation at the bleeding edge of technology). You’d like to alert the team whenever a document is uploaded to SharePoint that contains the word “Spec.” With the Flow integration in Teams, you can quickly create a flow that does exactly that and immediately share it with your team so that others can make edits if required. Let’s see how.  

Flow tab in Teams

To get started, navigate to the Strategy and Planning team in Teams and add the Flow tab to the General channel. To do so, click on the Add a tab + button.

Then select Flow from the All Tabs category. Finish installation by choosing Install, followed by Save. If prompted, sign in.

Create a flow

Once you’ve signed into Flow, you can choose to create a flow from blank or select from a template. With Flow, you can connect your team to a wide variety of services like SharePoint, Microsoft Forms, Twitter, and UserVoice. Select Create from template.  

Now choose the template labeled Alert the team when specific documents are uploaded.

When prompted, verify your connections and click Continue.     

In the Flow designer, the Teams action, Alert the team, is prepopulated with your current Team and Channel.

Choose a Site Address and Library Name for the trigger – When a file is created (properties only). In this example, we’ll choose the Strategy and Planning site and the Documents library. In the Condition, we’ll Alert the team when the file name contains “Spec.”

Finally, in the Alert the team action, we’ll customize the message to look like the following.

Save and close the flow by choosing Save. Once the flow is saved, it is automatically shared with the team and any member of the team can edit the Flow.

When a new document containing the word “spec” is uploaded, a new message is posted to the channel with a link to the file and the text you set in the flow.   

Use the bot to launch flows

Just like the personal app, the Flow tab also includes a Bot that enables you to run manual flows and those triggered on a schedule. Let’s suppose that we have a flow that runs weekly and posts a message to the Team reminding everyone of upcoming tech demos. You can check out this blog post on how to create such a flow. With the Flow Bot, you can run this flow immediately.

In the Conversations tab, enter @Flow followed by the command List flows. Once you get back a list of flows, enter the command Run flow followed by the index of the flow you want to run. For example, Run flow 1.

Teams’ triggers

In this release, we’ve also enhanced the Teams’ connector by adding triggers for When a new channel message is added and When I am mentioned in a channel message. You can use these triggers to create reminders in services like Microsoft To-Do and Todoist or to save certain messages to services like SharePoint.

Note – Currently, these triggers only apply to new messages. They don’t apply to replies and edits.

We hope you enjoy this new update. We’d like to seek your help in shaping the roadmap, so please leave us suggestions below and post on our Ideas forum.

The post Introducing the Flow Tab in Teams and new Teams’ triggers appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Install the Flow Add-in

To get started, in Excel, go to the Insert tab in the ribbon and select Store. Then, in the dialog, search for Microsoft Flow. Then, click Add.

Scenario

Let’s imagine that you work for Cronus Energy, a multi-national energy production company, which generates energy through wind turbines and hydroelectric power plants. Cronus is on the lookout for better ways to streamline and standardize internal processes to make things easier for their employees. They’ve identified a key process they want to modernize:

Transfer market data entered by Commercial Analysts (minimum energy to generate, maximum energy, and target energy based on revenue goals) to SharePoint so that the Operations team can decide which turbines to use for the week. After moving the data to SharePoint, they also want to send an alert to the team on Microsoft Teams and facilitate a discussion if needed. The Operations team uses a SharePoint list called Turbine Energy Distributions with the columns shown below. 

 
Their development team is already short on resources, so they want to be able to stand up the solution quickly while avoiding as much custom development as possible. Let’s see how Flow can help.

Create a flow

The Commercial Analysts at Cronus Energy enter market data in a spreadsheet hosted in SharePoint. To follow along, download this spreadsheet and upload it to SharePoint or OneDrive for Business.

 
To get started, click the Flow menu from under the Data tab in the ribbon. 

 
This will open the Flow launch panel in Excel where you will be prompted to Sign in and consent to the permissions requested by the add-in. Click Accept.

 Once you’ve signed in, you can explore several templates to quickly connect to a wide variety of services with minimal set up. Scroll down the screen and choose Create an item in SharePoint for a selected row.
 
Selecting the template will prompt you for your credentials and provide additional details about the template. Click Continue.

 
In the trigger (For a selected row), click the drop-down next to the Table field and select your table, e.g. Table1. The trigger may be collapsed; if so, click on Edit and confirm that the Table field is set to Table1.
The For a selected row trigger is similar to other manual triggers like the Flow button for mobile or SharePoint’s For a selected item – users can be prompted for inputs when they run the flow (Text, Yes/No, File, Email, or Number) and all flows run with the credentials of the invoker. For this flow, add a Text input called Message with the hint text of “Enter a message for the team.”

 
In the SharePoint-Create item action, enter the Site Address and List Name for Cronus Energy’s Turbine Energy Distributions List.

 
Click the Week field and select Week from the Dynamic content pane.
 
The parameters in the Dynamic content pane consist of your table’s columns – Week, Min Energy (mWh), Target Energy (mWh), Max Energy (mWh), Price ($/mWh), Revenue, and Profit, information about the person invoking the flow – Timestamp, User email, User id, and User name, and lastly any “manual” Outputs you add to the trigger like Message. 
Repeat this for the Energy Target, Min Energy, and Max Energy.

 
Now, add a Microsoft Teams – Post message action. Choose a Team and Channel to post your message to. In the Message field, enter a link to the newly created item along with the Message populated by the flow invoker.

 
Save the flow by clicking the Save button.

Run flow

Select a row in the table and then click Run flow in the Flow launch panel.

The first time you run this flow, you’ll be asked to confirm your credentials. You can also learn more about what this flow does. Click Continue.

 
Now enter a message to send to your team, requesting feedback. Click Run flow. 

Voila! An item is created in SharePoint with details from the row you selected in Excel and a message is posted on your behalf including your note asking for feedback and a link to the item.

 

 

Share a flow with run-only permissions

Now that you’ve created the flow, you can share it with colleagues either by adding them as an owner of the flow or as a run-only user. The latter allows you to maintain ownership of the flow, while enabling your colleagues to run it. In Flow, head over to My Flows and choose the Create an item in SharePoint for a selected row flow. Note – To run the flow, they must have access to the spreadsheet.
 

Under Manage Run-Only Users, click Add another person.
 
Here you can enter individuals, AD security groups, O365 groups, or even anyone that has access to the SharePoint list.  For each connector used in the flow, you can decide whether the invoker should bring their own credentials (“Provided by run-only user”) or use your credentials (“Use this connection”). Click Save to add the user as a run-only user.

We hope you enjoy this new update. If you have ideas for templates or other feedback, please leave us comments below or post on our Community forums.

The post Introducing Microsoft Flow integration in Excel appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Share your flows with Office 365 Groups and SharePoint lists

Currently Flow enables you to share flows with your colleagues either by adding them as co-owners or (for manual flows only) run-only users. As co-owners, they have full edit permissions for the flow. As run-only users of manual flows, they can only run the flow. Till date, you could only add other individuals in your tenant or security groups. Today, we are enhancing these capabilities by allowing you to share all flows with Office 365 Groups and for those flows that feature SharePoint triggers and actions with the referenced list or library.

Share with Office 365 Groups

Suppose you have a flow that you want to share with an Office 365 Group called CRONUS Energy. From the Flow details screen, you can choose to “Add another owner” and simply enter the name or email address of the O365 Group. All members will be added as co-owners to the flow and can find it listed under Team flows.  You can also add Office 365 Groups as run-only users to button flows.

Add a list as a co-owner

Let’s suppose you have a flow that runs when an item is created or modified in a SharePoint list – say Turbine Energy Distribution, this flow also does a Get item from another list called Turbines. You can add both lists as co-owners to the flow so that everyone who has edit access to the list automatically gets edit access to the flow. Once the flow has been shared, you can simply distribute a link to it.

Add a list as run-only user

Similarly, let’s suppose you have a flow that sends out a document for approval and it references the Documents library. From the Flow details screen, you can add the Site and corresponding Documents library as a run-only user, so that now all users that have read/write access to the Document library automatically have permissions to run the flow from the Flow menu in SharePoint.

SharePoint connector updates

As Flow is the successor to SharePoint Designer workflows, we continuously strive to improve our SharePoint connector capabilities. This week, we’ve added two new capabilities – triggers for When an item or file is deleted and an action to Send an HTTP request to SharePoint.

The new action helps advanced users that are familiar with the SharePoint REST APIs to build queries and get results from SharePoint, especially if existing actions don’t currently support what you need or for scenarios where no action is available. For example, you can use this action to filter items using lookup fields or for controlling permissions to an individual item.

Two new connectors

Last week we also released two new connectors in Microsoft Flow:

• Azure Data Factory – Azure Data Factory is a hybrid data integration service that allows you to create, schedule and orchestrate your ETL/ELT workflows at scale wherever your data lives, in cloud or self-hosted network.
• MailParser – Extract data from emails & automate your workflow with our powerful email parser software. Convert emails to Excel, parse leads from emails, and more.

Microsoft Flow Analytics now includes Error Details

In December, we announced Microsoft Flow Analytics where we provided flow makers with the ability to visualize their run history. Starting today, we are rolling out updates to our maker analytics experience to include Error Details. These analytics will help users quickly identify the source and magnitude of errors they may be encountering and aid in the prompt resolution of these errors.

In this release of Microsoft Flow Analytics, we are providing the ability to view:

• Number of errors by day
• Distribution of errors by type
• Error details table

Users can access Microsoft Flow Analytics by clicking on See analytics link from a flow’s main page.

Once in the analytics experience, users can click on the Errors tab to see the error details. From there, a user can filter data based upon a selected Date Range, Action(s), Trigger or Error Type(s). In addition to filtering, a user can navigate to the last occurrence of a specific error, by clicking on the hyperlink icon. After clicking on this link, a user will be re-directed to that specific run instance for further debugging.

Note: It may take up to 1.5 hours for run-time data to be loaded into our analytics experience. If instant run execution data is required, please see run details for a specific flow.

If you discover a discrepancy between the number of errors on your Usage tab compared to your Errors tab, there may be a valid reason for this including:

• If a trigger fails, you will not see it count as part of your usage as it does not represent a flow that has been successfully initiated. But, technically it is an error, so we will report it on our Errors tab.
• A flow may have multiple errors that exist within a single flow execution. For example, you may have a loop that contains multiple action(s) that have failed as part of that run instance.
• Within a flow, a maker can Configure run after settings, which allows a flow to continue executing when an action has failed.

Accessing Microsoft Flow Analytics requires a Flow Plan 2 license. If you do not see the See analytics link, appearing in the maker portal, that means that you do not meet the minimum licensing requirements. For more details about Flow licensing, including signing up for a free Flow Plan 2 trial license, please visit our licensing page.

The post Share your Flows with Office 365 Groups and SharePoint Lists, Connector Updates, and Analytics with Error Details appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We recently added the ability to make Apply to each loops run in parallel as opposed to in sequence. This capability allows you to set up a parallel approval where the list of approvers is dynamic and determined when the flow runs. In this advanced FOTW post, we’ll walk you through an example.

The scenario

Let’s imagine that you are a SharePoint administrator for the world’s greatest imaginary company, Contoso. At Contoso, you have a document library that hosts documents for each of your departments – Finance, Legal, and Marketing. Each department has its’ own folder.

You also have a SharePoint list (‘Department Approvers’) that has the approvers for each department. Notice how Approvers is a multi-value people field where Finance has 3 approvers, Legal has 2 approvers, and Marketing has a single approver.  

Now, you want to create a Flow such that for a selected document, based on the folder path of the document (e.g. Finance), you will send an approval request to each of the department’s approvers (e.g. Dan Holme, Patricia Hendricks, and Alyssa Danesh). As soon as approver reviews the document, you want to notify the requestor, with the approver’s comments.

Let’s look at the Flow in detail. You can download it from here.

The trigger

To allow your end-users to start the workflow manually whenever they want to seek approval on a given document and provide runtime inputs like a Message to approvers, use the For a selected item trigger.

When invoked in SharePoint, end-users can see details about the Flow and enter a message via the Flow launch panel. (Learn more about the Flow launch panel)

Identify the folder Name

The For a selected item trigger returns the ID of the selected item, any runtime inputs specified (such as Message to approvers), and information about the invoker (such as User email and the Timestamp at which the flow was invoked).

To get more details about the selected file, use the Get item action and pass it the ID of the selected file.

Once you have the selected file, you can identify the name of the folder with an expression like the below and set a string variable called folderName.  

first(skip(split(body(‘Get_item’)?[‘{Path}’],’/’),2))

Determine the approvers

Having established which folder the selected file is located in, find the relevant approvers for that folder/department. Call the Get items action on the Department Approvers list (labeled as Get approvers by department below) and use an ODATA filter query such as Title eq ‘[folderName]’ with Top Count of 1. Next, initialize an array variable called Approvers. This array will be populated with approver emails.  

Since the Get approvers by department action returns an array of values (albeit of size 1), you’ll need to add an apply to each loop and iterate over the array. For each item, first Get the item properties (Get department approvers). Then, create another apply to each loop to iterate over Approvers (recall that Approvers is a multi-value people field) and append it to the Approvers variable (using the Append to array variable action).

For each approver

Finally, iterate over the Approvers array with another Apply to each loop. This loop contains a Start an approval action and a condition that sends an approval or rejection notification based on whether the Response is “Approved” or “Rejected”. Note – you can reference the currently selected item (approver in this case) using Current item attribute.

Parallel approvals

In order to ensure that all of the approvers receive their request at the same time, the For each approver loop must run in parallel. Click on the ellipsis menu of the loop and choose Settings.

Now override the Default and bump the degree of parallelism to the maximum. Note – the text incorrectly states that for each loops execute in paralell by default. They run in sequence by default.

Recap

In this blog post, we showed you how to send out dynamic parallel approval requests using the new concurrency control settings in for each loops. We also got a flavor for other Flow capabilities like variables, expressions, and ODATA filter queries.

The post Advanced | Flow of the Week: Send parallel approval requests to a dynamic set of approvers appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Let’s imagine that you’re the Chief Compliance Officer at the Legal department at Contoso Inc. (as most of you know, Contoso is the world’s largest imaginary corporation). You want to send out an approval request whenever a new document is uploaded to the Legal folder in a SharePoint document library. To inform approvers and ensure everyone has visibility into any feedback, you want to notify your teammates on Microsoft Teams. With the Flow integration in Teams, you can quickly create a flow and boost your team’s productivity. Let’s learn how.

Install the Flow app

To get started, install the Flow app from the Teams’ Store. To access the Store, click on the icon at the bottom of the left-hand navigation bar. Then, choose the Flow app from Top picks or type “Flow” in the search box.

Create a new flow in Teams

Once you’ve installed the app, you’ll notice four tabs – Conversation, Flows, Approvals, and About. The Conversation tab enables you to interact with the FlowBot, the Flows tab allows you to create new flows and manage existing ones, and the Approvals tab lists your received and sent approval requests. Click on the Flow tab and Sign in.

Then, click on the Create from template button.

You can choose from several templates, connecting your Team to services like SharePoint, Microsoft Forms, Dynamics, Twitter, PowerBI, and UserVoice. Select the template titled Start approval for new documents and notify via Teams.

Clicking on the template, will open the Flow designer.

For the trigger, When a file is created, select the SharePoint site and library hosting the data for your team.  For the Post message actions, select the Team and Channel for the Legal department. Finally, enter the names of your teammates for the Start approval action.

Note – All of the SharePoint files triggers and actions are usable for your team’s file library as the underlying data source is SharePoint.

Save the flow by clicking the Create flow button.  

Do your approvals in Teams

Let’s see our flow in action. In the Legal channel, navigate to the Files tab and upload a new file.

Notice that the Flow is immediately triggered and a message is posted in the Legal channel asking the team to approve the newly uploaded file. This message matches the values we entered while creating the flow. The message is posted on behalf of the flow creator.

Click on the ellipsis to see your personal apps and switch to the Flow app. Now navigate to the Approvals tab. You’ll notice a pending approval for the newly uploaded file.

Once you’ve reviewed the file, click on Approve or Reject, enter a comment, and click Confirm.

Bam! A new message is posted to the Legal channel with details about the approver and his/her comments.

Use the bot to launch Flows

The Flow integration in Teams also includes a Bot that enables you to run manual flows. Currently, this is limited to flows that run on a schedule, with support for all manual flows coming soon.

Continuing with our earlier example of the Legal department at Contoso, let’s imagine that we have a flow that runs daily and posts a message to the Team reminding everyone to review certain files for due diligence. You can check out this blog post on how to create such a flow.

Using the Flow bot, we can run this flow immediately. Head over to the Conversation tab. To see the list of flows you can run, enter the command List flows.

Once you get back a list of flows, enter the command run flow followed by the index of the flow you want to run. For example, run flow 1.

You’ll notice the Flow immediately runs and posts a message in the Legal channel.

This is just the beginning

We see our integration in Teams as just the beginning of a long journey in making you and your team more productive. We’d like to seek your help in shaping the roadmap, so please leave us suggestions below and post on our Ideas forum. We hope you enjoy this new update and stay tuned for more!

The post Introducing Flow Integration in Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In this post, we’ll walk you through an example of how to create and customize a flow that uses the launch panel’s capabilities using the For a selected item trigger. We’ll also demonstrate how you can enable other members of your organization to run this flow using run-only permissions.

Create a flow

Let’s imagine that you work at a travel agency called Contoso Adventures and you store images used in your brochures in a SharePoint document library. Using the Flow launch panel, you can quickly collect feedback from your colleagues by runing a flow on-demand that posts a message to Microsoft Teams with a link to the selected item. To get started, simply select the Flow menu followed by the Create a flow button. 

This will open a pane on the right-hand side of the window listing several templates you can choose from, enabling you to connect your SharePoint data to OneDrive, Teams, Yammer, Planner, and more. Select the template titled Post a message to Teams for a selected item.

Selecting the template will open a new tab in the Microsoft Flow site with additional details about the template. Click Continue.

In the flow, you’ll notice a new trigger for SharePoint called “For a selected item.” The trigger is modeled after Flow’s button trigger, allowing you to run flows on demand and capture additional inputs that will be populated by the invoker of the Flow. These inputs can be of type Text (either a single choice or a list of options), File, or Email. We’ll learn more about customizing inputs later in this post.

For now, create the flow by specifying a Team and Channel to post your message to.  If you click on Edit, you can customize the content of the message to be posted. By default, we include the text description entered by the invoker (Message) followed by a link to the selected item.

Save the flow by clicking the Create flow button.

Run a flow using the Flow Launch Panel

Back in your SharePoint document library, select a document and click on the Flow menu. Then, choose the newly created flow – “Post a message to Teams for a selected item.”

Clicking on the flow, opens the Flow Launch Panel. The first time you run this flow, you’ll be asked to confirm your credentials. You can also learn more about what this flow does. Click Continue.

Now, enter a message to send to your team, requesting feedback. Click Run flow.

Voila! A new message is posted to Teams on your behalf including the note you added in SharePoint and a link to the selected item.

Share a flow with run-only permissions

Now that you’ve created the flow, you can share it with colleagues either by adding them as an owner of the flow or as a run-only user. The latter allows you to maintain ownership of the flow, while enabling your colleagues to run it. In Flow, head over to My Flows and choose the Post a message to Teams for a selected item.

Under Manage Run-Only Users, click on the Add another person button.

Here, you can enter individuals or AD security groups. We will be adding support for Office 365 groups in the future.  For each connector used in the flow, you can decide whether the invoker should bring their own credentials (“Provided by run-only user”) or use your credentials (“Use this connection”). Click Save to add the user as a run-only user.

Customize the flow

Let’s customize the flow you created earlier and ask the invoker whether they want to send the selected file for review to their manager or post it to Teams. In the For a selected item trigger, let’s add a text  input called Destination. Let’s replace the hint text for this input with a custom message “Select Email to manager or Post to Teams”.

Then, click on the ellipsis followed by the Add a list of options button.

For the first option, enter “Post to Teams” and for the second option, enter “Email to manager.”

Now, let’s add a condition after the Get item step that checks whether the Destination is equal to Post to Teams. And, let’s drag and drop the Post a message action into the Yes branch.

Let’s finish off our flow by adding a Get manager and a Send an email action in the No branch. You can get the Invoker’s email, OID, or display name by referencing dynamic content such as User email, User id, and User name respectively.

Now when you invoke the flow in SharePoint, you’ll be asked to select a Destination and the flow will act (post a message to Teams or send your manager an email) depending on your selection.

We hope you enjoy this new update. If you have ideas for templates or other feedback, please leave us comments below or post on our Community forums.

The post Introducing Flow Launch Panel in SharePoint Lists and Libraries appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

• Run a flow on demand for a selected file – You can select any file and convert it to PDF, send it to your manager for approval, ask for feedback over email, or post to Teams.
• Run flows on a folder – You can now set up flows like save your email attachments to a selected folder or get alerts whenever a new file is uploaded directly from OneDrive for Business.

We’ve also recently added several new actions to boost your document management capabilities. These include:

• Convert file using path and Convert file (enabling you to convert files to PDF)
• Create share link and Create share link by path
• Copy file and Copy file using path
• Upload a file from a URL
• Search for files in a folder
• Move or rename files

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the new integration and some of the new connector capabilities.

Run a flow on demand for a selected file

Let’s suppose you’re working on a series of legal contracts and you want to quickly convert these contracts from .docx to PDF and share with your business partner once they’re ready.  You can quickly set up a Flow to do both tasks for you instantly.

In OneDrive, click on the Flow menu, followed by the Create a flow command.

This will open a pane on the right hand side of the window listing several templates you can choose from. Select the template titled Convert selected file to PDF.

Selecting the template will open a new tab in the Microsoft Flow site with additional details about the template. Click Continue.

By default this Flow will convert the selected file to PDF and upload it to the current folder in OneDrive.

Let’s expand the Convert file using path action to get a better understanding of how it works. This action takes in the file path of the file that is to be converted, in this case the selected file, and converts it to the target type of PDF.

Let’s edit this flow and add a Create share link by path action at the bottom of the flow. Let’s set the File Path to be the Path of the converted file (using the Path token from Create file action), the Link type to be Edit, and the Link scope to be Organization.

Now, let’s add an O365 Outlook Send an email action. After setting the To and Subject, we’ll include a link to the converted file in the Body of the email.

Let’s complete our Flow by changing the Flow name to “Convert selected file to PDF and email Dan” clicking the Save flow button.

Back in OneDrive, select a document and click on the Flow menu. Then, click on the newly created flow to run it.

When we refresh the page, we’ll see a newly converted PDF and Dan will receive an email with a link to this file.

Run flows on a folder

From within any folder in OneDrive, you can select the Flow button and the Create a flow command to set up a flow that saves email attachments in Office 365 Outlook to this folder or sends you a push notification whenever a new file is added to this folder.

For example, let’s suppose that we want to save all email attachments sent by a client (Fabrikam Inc.) in the current folder (Fabrikam Contracts). Let’s suppose this client includes the word “Fabrikam” in the subject of each email. We can set up a Flow to automatically save email attachments from Fabrikam Inc. to the Fabrikam Contracts folder.

In OneDrive, while in the Fabrikam Contracts folder, click on the Flow menu, followed by the Create a flow command. Now click on the template titled Save Office 365 email attachments to OneDrive for Business.

This will open the template in the Flow website, confirm your credentials and click Continue. Expand the On new email action and click on the Show advanced options command.  Set the Subject Filter field to Fabrikam.

That’s it! Whenever you receive a new email where the subject contains Fabrikam, any email attachments will be automatically uploaded to the Fabrikam Contracts folder. If you have ideas for templates or other feedback, please leave us comments below or post on our Community forums.

The post Microsoft Flow integration in One Drive for Business and new connector actions appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The scenario

Let’s imagine that we store our site inspection reports in a SharePoint list. An inspection consists of fields like the Site Name, Site Location, Technician, Inspection Date, and Notes.

Our flow runs every day and gets all inspections that are to be conducted today using the Filter array action. Once we’ve got today’s inspections, we’ll create an HTML table with each row. Finally, we’ll send an email that has all the data collated together.  

Let’s look at the flow in detail.  

The trigger

Let’s schedule our Flow to run every day at 8AM. With recent changes to the Recurrence action, you can now easily and precisely set when a flow should start.

Get today’s items

Once the flow has been triggered, we’ll Get all list items and then use a Filter array action to hone in on just the work items whose Inspection Date is marked as today.

The magic sauce to getting today’s inspections is the ticks() expression. Given a timestamp in string format, the Ticks expression returns the number of ticks (100 nanosecond intervals) since 1^st January, 1601. By using ticks, we can compare two different timestamp values.

In our flow, we’ll check if the number of ticks for the Inspection Date field (the left hand side of the Filter array action) are equal to the number of ticks for Today’s date (the right hand side of the Filter array action). i.e. –

ticks(item()?[‘Inspection_x0020_Date’])

=

ticks(utcNow(‘MM/dd/yyyy’))

In SharePoint, the Inspection Date is stored with only the Date format, e.g. 10/20/2017. The ticks() expression will calculate the number of ticks for 10/20/2017 at 12:00AM. Similarly, the number of ticks for utcNow(), which is today’s date and time must be qualified with the ‘MM/dd/yyyy’ format, to ensure that we get the ticks for today’s date at 12:00AM and not the ticks for the current time (which would be greater than 12:00AM)

Create an HTML table for filtered results

Now that we have a filtered array of today’s inspections, we’ll create an Apply to each loop to iterate over each result. In the Apply to each loop, we’ll use the Compose action to create an HTML table row per inspection.

To reference inspection fields, like the Site Name or Title, we’ll use an expression like the following: items(‘Apply_to_each’)?[‘Title’]. We’ll use the same approach to reference the Location field – items(‘Apply_to_each’)?[‘Site_x0020_Location’] and the Display Name of the Technician – items(‘Apply_to_each’)?[‘Technician’]?[‘DisplayName’]. Note – Technician is a Person field in SharePoint.

Send an email with an HTML table

Outside of the Apply to each loop, we’ll use the Send an email action. In the action, set the Is HTML property to Yes and then insert the results of the Apply to each loop as a table in the Body.

To get the results of the Compose action, we’ll use the join(actionOutputs(‘Compose’),”) expression. This simply collates each output (i.e. an HTML row) using the blank character as a separator.

Now every day, you’ll get an email like this with details about today’s inspections.

You can learn more about the expressions used in this post in the Workflow definition language documentation. We hope you found this post useful! As always, please share your feedback using the comments below. If you have a question or idea, leave it below or head over to the Microsoft Flow Community.

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Get me an digest of today’s inspections in a single email appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This support comes in the form of two new triggers – When a file is created (properties only) and When a file is created or modified (properties only) and three new actions – Get file properties, Get files (properties only) and Update file properties.

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through a detailed example of how to use these triggers and actions. We’ll also use this opportunity to introduce you to a couple of additional properties that have been added to ease your flow building experience.

File Triggers and Actions

Let’s suppose you have a document library for housing legal documents. In this library, you’ve added a Person column to track a document’s owner.

Let’s create a flow that will:

• Notify the Chief Legal Officer and assign him/her as the owner whenever a new document is added.

• Notify the owner whenever a document is modified

To do so, create a flow from blank and add the trigger – When a file is created or modified (properties only). Notice how this trigger contains a Library Name field which enumerates all the document libraries in your site.

Now add a Condition where you check whether the [Modified] property is equal to the [Created] property. If it is, then this is a new document. If it’s not, then it’s a modified document.

In the If yes branch (new document), add a Send email action. When you select the To field in the Dynamic content dialog, you’ll see all the fields in your document library including the Owner field which is further broken down into properties such as Owner DisplayName, Owner Email, Owner JobTitle, etc. Set the To field to the Chief Legal Officer, the Subject to “New document added – [Name],” and the Email Body to “[Link to Item].” Name and Link to Item are additional properties we’ve made available (more on this further down in the post).

After the Send email action, add the Update file properties action. This allows you to update the properties of a file. If you want to update the contents, use the Update file action. Match the Site Address and Library Name with the values entered in the trigger. Set the Id field to the [ID] of the uploaded file. For the Owner Claims field, select from the list of users or enter a custom value.

In the No branch (modified document), send an email to the Owner letting them know that a file they own has been modified and include a link to the item. In this case, we’re using the Owner Email field which is a property of the document library and the Name and Link to item properties.

Additional Properties

In this release, we’ve appended some new properties to triggers and actions to make SharePoint items easier to use in Flow and PowerApps. These properties are not direct visible in SharePoint. The full list is below:

• Name – file name of the item in document libraries, display name of the item in lists

• Folder path – Path to the folder the item is in, relative to the site address

• Identifier – Value that can be used in file related actions for selecting a file

• Link to item – Link that can be used to get to the file or list item. Only people with permissions to the item will be able to open the link.

Known issue

We are working on adding the item ID as an output of the Create File action, so that you can use it in conjunction with the Update file properties.

Onwards we go

The SharePoint + Flow story continues to be a high priority for us and we (can’t stop) won’t stop until we’ve ensured Flow is a worthy successor to SharePoint Designer workflows. As always, share your feedback using the comments below. If you have a question or an idea, head over to the Microsoft Flow Community.

The post Support for SharePoint Document Library Properties appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Let’s look at a quick example to learn more. Imagine that you have a SharePoint list to track Travel requests. This list has the following fields. Notice how it’s a mix of Text, Date and Time, Choice, Person, and Lookup. 

Let’s now create an approval flow for incoming travel requests using this template and point it to the Travel Requests list.

In the Yes branch, let’s add a new action, SharePoint – Update item, and point it to the same site and list as the trigger. Notice how the Update item action now includes all editable fields from the list. The same applies to the Create item action also.

Furthermore, the list of possible values for the Choice (Approval Status) and Lookup (Team) fields are the same as those presented in SharePoint. For the Person field (Backup Engineer), you’ll have to type in a valid email address.

We hope you can make use of these new additions as you build out new flows and enhance existing ones.

Known issues

There are two known issues with this release that we will be addressing in the coming weeks.

1. Once you have created your flow, if you add a new Person, Choice, or Lookup field to your list, attempting to edit and save your Flow will result in an error at runtime. To work around this issue, you must delete and recreate the Update item or Create item action in your flow.

Note – This applies only if you edit your Flow, otherwise the flow will continue to run.

2. To write to a Person field, you must enter a valid email address for an individual in your organization.

Coming soon

We continue to invest in our SharePoint + Flow story and want to ensure that Flow is a worthy successor to SharePoint Designer workflow. Some of the upcoming features on our connector roadmap include:

• Support for Managed Metadata fields (aka Taxonomy)

• Support for document library metadata

• Support for multi-values fields

• Support attachments for list items

• Support content publishing workflows

Share your feedback using the comments below. Have a question or an idea? Head over to the Microsoft Flow Community.

The post Setting SharePoint’s Person, Choice, and Lookup fields appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.