You can find this new dashboard under the Actions tab, in the Flow Analytics section.

For flows with a lot of daily activity this feature helps users understand how many actions are running each day. It can help you detect inefficiencies in your workflow logic, overages, understand usage patterns to optimize for capacity, and more.

The next section dives deeper into technical details of how limits affect the performance of your flow. It aims to provide insights for an important segment of our customer base that builds complex, high performance flows with activity in hundreds of thousands of actions executed every day.
What is the difference between a run vs an action?

A flow run is an instance of a workflow execution. A run starts when an event that initiates the flow occurs. One or more actions are executed as part of a flow run.

For instance, a simple flow with 1 trigger and 1 action will result in 2 “actions” executed per run, consuming 2 requests. You can learn more about request limits and allocations here
How many API requests is my flow consuming?

1 API request is consumed for every action executed during a flow run.

An action can consume more than 1 API request – if pagination, retries, or loops (Apply to each, Do-until, etc.) are involved.

What happens when my flow runs too many actions?

When you have a flow that is executing many actions – it’s important to understand the limits of the services you are working with and if at all, its impact on the performance of your flow.

In the most common case – exceeding limits will result in delayed execution of subsequent actions – which will slow down the overall execution of your flow run. These delays are proportional to the degree of overages caused by a flow, and they only become apparent when there is egregious violation of limits.

For instance: Exceeding your daily limits by 500 actions is going to have zero impact on the performance of your flow, however exceeding your limit by 50,000 actions will have a significant performance impact on your flow.

 
Diagnosing performance issues

If you’re experiencing delays or slowdowns during your flow execution, its likely that you have hit Power Automate limits for the day.

When this happens, it’s a good idea to revisit your flow design and check for any efficiency that can help reduce the number of actions being executed. You can find more information on these limits here

In addition to this, for flows that are consistently getting delayed due to overages – users also receive a notification informing them about these overages with tips and tricks on how to prevent delayed execution of your flow runs.

Here is an example of an email that was sent for a flow that was consistently running up against action limits.

Limits from connected services

Similar to Power Automate, most SaaS services and apps also tend to implement similar service protection limits and abuse detection algorithms.

A misconfigured flow can sometimes reach these limits, which usually manifest as errors [429] or timeouts [5xx] in your flow runs. Its important to note that these limits vary based on the connector / service you’re using within your flow. More details on connector limits can be found here

Please leave your comments below and tell us if there are other analytics features you would like us to add in the for Power Automate. We value your feedback and are always looking for new ways to delight our customers.

The post Introducing action analytics in Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

A couple of things to keep in mind before we dive deeper:

This new feature is only available for “Solution-Aware” flows, as it relies on the solution framework provided by the Common Data Service instance. Learn more about solutions in Power Platform.

To understand, how connection references work, it is important to understand how flows and connections are associated with each other.

Without connection references – every action in your flow is bound to a specific instance of a connection that it will use to “execute” that action. This is why today, while moving flows across environments – users are required to rebind every operation to a connection.

[Connections contain secrets, and therefore can’t be moved across environments]

Visualizing this across multiple flows – you may have something as follows, where each dotted line indicates – a link that requires rebinding after importing or updating a flow via a solution.

When you move flows across environments – all the links shown by dotted lines are severed. This means in the above example without connection references, users are required to rebind each of these six links between flow operations and connections after performing an update or import.

Connection references provides an abstraction layer between resources (like flows and canvas apps) and the connections they use, and has durable dependency tracking across environments. This means you will only need to setup your connection references once per environment!

Another added benefit of this feature is that if you ever need to swap out connections, you will only have to do it once – by updating the connection reference to a different connection (as opposed to updating every operation).

Please note, during the preview – there is a limitation of reusing a connection reference in up to 16 flows only. This limitation will be removed as the feature becomes generally available.

Using Connection References

If you’re building a new solution-aware flow, connection references will automatically be created for you.

Users are also able to create connection references independently, from the +New menu in the solution explorer.

In summary,

• Connection references are a new concept that is preview, for Solution-aware flows. It’s primary function is to allow for healthy ALM for resources that rely on connections, within the solutions framework.
• Updating the value of a connection reference will automatically update the flows using the connection reference.
• Connection references offer semantic value with editable display names and descriptions. Eg – A connection reference named “Service Account” can point to a connection named “svcaccount1@contoso.com”; this provides for improved discovery, selection and organization of connections.
• Canvas apps also support connection references! Learn more

If you have any feedback or questions, please leave them in the comments section below.

The post Move flows across environments without resetting connections! appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This has been one of the most desired features which our users have been asking for and it is finally here.

In this post, I will share how to use the Clipboard, along with some tips and tricks so that you can cut the amount of time it takes for you to build flows.

In the Flow designer – you will notice we have added a new tab called “My clipboard” – this is where all the actions you copy will be stored.

To add any action to the clipboard – click on the “…” icon and select “Copy to my clipboard” option

To paste / re-use the action – simply add the action, as you would add any other action, by selecting the “My clipboard” tab and selecting the copied action

You can also paste / re-use actions across flows! This feature does not, I repeat does NOT, limit you to using the copied actions in one flow.

Additional tips and tricks

1. Use “Scope” to copy multiple actions at a time

If you want to copy multiple actions in one go – use “Scope”. You can do this by adding a “Scope” step to your flow, then drag and drop the actions you’d like to copy into the Scope step. Finally add the “Scope” to the clipboard.

2. Peek code using info bubble

If you’re an advanced user and would like to view the “code” of your copied action – hover on the “info” bubble and you can see what’s in the copied action.

3. Copy-paste like a Pro [Must read for power users]

And finally – there is another very cool feature built into “My clipboard” for all the flow-hackers reading this post, who’d like to share components of their flow offline.

You can access the “code” snippet of an action by opening Notepad and pressing CTRL+V, after you have copied it to a clipboard, then click on “My clipboard” and press CTRL+V and watch as your “code” snippet gets automatically converted to step you can use in any of your flows.

Here is a sample for you to try out. Copy the below code and navigate to “My Clipboard” and press CTRL+V

{"id":"781c2853-bd19-41f6-a9fb-10e4-ce070ecd","brandColor":"#0072c6","connectionReferences":{"shared_office365":{"connection":{"id":"/providers/Microsoft.PowerApps/apis/shared_office365/connections/shared-office365-89febf86-c72c-4424-af94-794a0cf53588"}}},"connectorDisplayName":"Office 365 Outlook","icon":"https://connectoricons-prod.azureedge.net/office365/icon_1.0.1227.1634.png","isTrigger":false,"operationName":"Email_Copy","operationDefinition":{"type":"ApiConnection","inputs":{"host":{"connection":{"name":"@json(decodeBase64(triggerOutputs().headers['X-MS-APIM-Tokens']))['$connections']['shared_office365']['connectionId']"}},"method":"post","body":{"To":"","Subject":"Test Subject","Body":"<p>Test email body</p>"},"path":"/v2/Mail","authentication":{"type":"Raw","value":"@json(decodeBase64(triggerOutputs().headers['X-MS-APIM-Tokens']))['$ConnectionKey']"}},"runAfter":{"Send_an_email_(V2)":["Succeeded"]}}}

You should see the following action show up in your clipboard

Three new user experience improvements

In addition to Clipboard support, we have also introduced a few user experience updates in the last few months, that will make it easier for you to create, manage and run your flows

1. New create experiences

These new create experiences make it easy for you to start off your flow. You can find them under the +New option on the My flows tab.

For instance, if you want to create a Scheduled flow that runs only on weekdays – you can set it up as shown below

2. New flow details page

The new details page is cleaner and streamlined. It optimizes screen real estate, as well as provides more information on your flow.

3. New run flow experience

We have also updated the run flow experience. The new “run flow” experience  uses modern controls to collect inputs from users running your flow and allows you to quickly review connections and actions used in the flow for the added peace of mind.

That’s it from me for in this post. Looking forward to your feedback and comments!

The post Introducing Clipboard in Flow Designer and three new user experience updates appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Today, we are going to be looking at one of the common asked questions by our customers, sending multiple attachments on a single email. To illustrate this, we will be creating an item on a SharePoint list and attach a few files to it. Our flow will trigger, on this new item being added. The flow will get all the attachments on the item, construct an array of all the attachments and finally we will use this “array of attachments” and send it out on an email. Let’s dig in to it, shall we?

Let start by adding a trigger – “When an item is created” and selecting the correct SharePoint Site and List.

Please ensure that you already have SP List created that allows storing multiple attachments on the items in it.

After adding the trigger, we need to fetch all the attachments added to the newly created list item. We should, hence, add the “Get attachments” action. The Site name and List name remain the same from the previous step. We want to then pipe the output “ID” from the trigger, to the input ‘ID’ field.

Now, that we have a handle on all the attachments – we must store these in a single array. Let’s start by initializing an array.

Once the array is initialized, the next step is fetch and store the attachment contents in the array. This is a bit tricky to setup, so be careful to follow the instructions to the T.

• Start by adding a “apply to each loop”, then chose the “body” output from the “Get Attachments”

• Next add “Get attachment content” action inside the loop. The SP site name and list name don’t change.

  • For the ID field – select ID output from the “When an item is created” trigger

  • For the file identifier field – Select the Id output from the “Get Attachments” action.

• Next, we want to start adding to the array we just initialized. Set it up as shown below

Let’s revisit what we have setup so far –

• For a new item created – we are first fetching all the attachments that were added to the item.

• The “Get attachments” action returns the file names of the attachment and a corresponding “file identifier”. It does NOT return the contents of the attachment.

• The attachment content is fetched separately using the “Get attachment content” action.

• Our array, contains the attachment item with two properties – Name and ContentBytes. We are assigning the DisplayName, retrieved from “Get Attachments” action to the Name property and the Attachment Content, retrieved from “Get Attachment Contents” action to the ContentBytes property.

Now for the final step, we need to send the email with the attachments array we just constructed.

This step is straightforward, add an action to send an email – using your favorite email connector and pipe in the attachmentArray output to the attachments input field.

That’s it! Once you have successfully created and saved your flow, be sure to test it by exercising the trigger. You should see an email like as shown in your inbox with multiple attachments sent on a single email.

That’s it for this time. If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback about flow, please feel free to post below in the comments, in our community, or reach out on Twitter.

The post Advanced | Flow of the Week: Send multiple attachments on a single email appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

If you have been using Microsoft Flow for a while and have automated your business processes, chances are that your flow has failed or errored out due to some unforeseen circumstances or bugs in the logic of your flow.

One of the key principles of software engineering is to consider and handle as many failure cases as you can, but to also be able to detect, respond and recover from failures as soon as you can, when they happen. These principles can be transferred to business processes that are automated using Microsoft Flow. Today, for Flow of the week – I am going to show you how to stay on top of mission critical business processes that you have automated using Flow, and how to get notified or perform recovery steps in case a flow fails or errors out. Let’s jump into the details, and look at the how, since we have already established the what.

I have a flow that copies over the images I upload to a folder in my OneDrive account to my Azure Storage account and emails me back a link to that image, so I can use the link in my blogs. Pretty cool right?

Imagine if I upload an image to my OneDrive folder and for some reason the automated email doesn’t show up. I don’t want to waste time waiting, instead I go over to the Flow portal and discover that something went wrong with my flow. Now if only, I had been notified after the first image I uploaded that my flow was failing due to expired Outlook credentials – I wouldn’t have uploaded the other 10 images. Now with the recently released “Configure run-after” feature you can catch such errors and react to them programmatically.

For my flow, I am going to “configure run-after” on the last action, and if the last action doesn’t execute successfully – then I will send a push notification, notifying me of the flow not able to run successfully.

In the image below, you can see that I have configured my flow to send a push notification with a link to the run details page – this helps me quickly figure out what went wrong.

Now, in this case the “send email” action failed, but if any of the previous steps had failed, it will cause the penultimate action to be skipped and which in turn results in the last action (send notification) being executed.

That’s it for this time. If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback about flow, please feel free to post below in the comments, in our community, or reach out on Twitter.

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Get notified immediately when your flow has errors or failures appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Part 1. Create your Visual Studio Project and Web API

• Start off by create a ASP.NET Web Application, by navigating to File > New Project > Web > ASP.NET Web Application

• On the next screen, select Web API and uncheck the “Host in the cloud” check box.
• To keep things simple, click on “Change Authentication” and select “No authentication”. You can choose to protect your API – using Basic or Windows authentication, if you so desire.

• After, clicking “OK”, Visual Studio will take a few moments to create your boiler plate Web API and you should see the following screen on successful creation of the application.

• Navigate to the Controllers Folder in the Solution Explorer and ensure that you have the values controller to exercise through a web request tool like Fiddler or Postman.

• Deploy your solution by clicking on the Play button in the toolbar.

• The home page of your web API should open in a browser. The web API should now be running locally on IIS, make a note of the URL and Port that points to your web API

• Using the Composer functionality in Fiddler, we can now exercise our API by making a GET call to http://localhost:1876/api/values/. If the request returns with a 200 OK response, you have successfully created and hosted a RESTful web API on your local machine.

• Next, we need to make sure that we can access the Web API using the local machine’s IP address, which means that making a GET call to http://{YOUR_IP_ADDRESS}:{YOUR_PORT_NUmber}/api/values/ should return the same results. If you can’t get this to work, make sure IIS is configured correctly to allow calling your API using your machines IP address. This blog post goes in detail on how you can do just that, in case you are using IIS Express to host your API.

Part 2. Registering your on-premises Web API as a custom connector in Microsoft Flow or PowerApps

If you aren’t familiar with custom connector and required concepts, I highly recommend reading up on it before proceeding further. The section assumes that you’re familiar with custom connector concepts.

• Start by navigating to the Microsoft Flow or the PowerApps web portal and click on the Gear menu > Custom Connector. Click + New Custom Connector and select from Create from blank. Next, give a name to your connector.

• Fill out the general section, of the custom connector. The most important piece here are the base URL and the host. Make sure you set it up to use your IP and Port. Ensure that you also select the correct scheme, for this instance we should be using HTTP, as we haven’t configured our API to use HTTPS.

• As our API uses no authentication, we don’t need to change anything on the Security Tab.
• Under the definition tab, we will go ahead and define the Get Values operation by importing a sample request and response.

• Once everything is imported and validated, go ahead and create the connector. The connector will take a few minutes to be operational.

Part 3. Testing the Custom Connector via on-premises data gateway

• You will need to install an on-premise data gateway on a machine inside your network. You can download the latest version of the on-premises data gateway from here. Once setup correctly, you should see a successful status on your local installation of the gateway.

• After installing the gateway, create a connection for testing the connector. Make sure you choose the gateway we just installed to connect through to our on-premises web API.

• Finally, test the custom connector by actually making a request though the test custom connector UI. If you see a 200 OK response come back, you have successfully managed to accomplish exactly what we had initially set out do.

If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback about the on-premises custom connector capability, please feel free to post below in the comments, in our community, or reach out on Twitter.

The post Connect to custom on-premises APIs using data gateway appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Part 1. Create your Visual Studio Project and Web API

• Start off by create a ASP.NET Web Application, by navigating to File > New Project > Web > ASP.NET Web Application

• On the next screen, select Web API and uncheck the “Host in the cloud” check box.
• To keep things simple, click on “Change Authentication” and select “No authentication”. You can choose to protect your API – using Basic or Windows authentication, if you so desire.

• After, clicking “OK”, Visual Studio will take a few moments to create your boiler plate Web API and you should see the following screen on successful creation of the application.

• Navigate to the Controllers Folder in the Solution Explorer and ensure that you have the values controller to exercise through a web request tool like Fiddler or Postman.

• Deploy your solution by clicking on the Play button in the toolbar.

• The home page of your web API should open in a browser. The web API should now be running locally on IIS, make a note of the URL and Port that points to your web API

• Using the Composer functionality in Fiddler, we can now exercise our API by making a GET call to http://localhost:1876/api/values/. If the request returns with a 200 OK response, you have successfully created and hosted a RESTful web API on your local machine.

• Next, we need to make sure that we can access the Web API using the local machine’s IP address, which means that making a GET call to http://{YOUR_IP_ADDRESS}:{YOUR_PORT_NUmber}/api/values/ should return the same results. If you can’t get this to work, make sure IIS is configured correctly to allow calling your API using your machines IP address. This blog post goes in detail on how you can do just that, in case you are using IIS Express to host your API.

Part 2. Registering your on-premises Web API as a custom connector in Microsoft Flow or PowerApps

If you aren’t familiar with custom connector and required concepts, I highly recommend reading up on it before proceeding further. The section assumes that you’re familiar with custom connector concepts.

• Start by navigating to the Microsoft Flow or the PowerApps web portal and click on the Gear menu > Custom Connector. Click + New Custom Connector and select from Create from blank. Next, give a name to your connector.

• Fill out the general section, of the custom connector. The most important piece here are the base URL and the host. Make sure you set it up to use your IP and Port. Ensure that you also select the correct scheme, for this instance we should be using HTTP, as we haven’t configured our API to use HTTPS.

• As our API uses no authentication, we don’t need to change anything on the Security Tab.
• Under the definition tab, we will go ahead and define the Get Values operation by importing a sample request and response.

• Once everything is imported and validated, go ahead and create the connector. The connector will take a few minutes to be operational.

Part 3. Testing the Custom Connector via on-premises data gateway

• You will need to install an on-premises data gateway on a machine inside your network. You can download the latest version of the on-premises data gateway from here. Once setup correctly, you should see a successful status on your local installation of the gateway.

• After installing the gateway, create a connection for testing the connector. Make sure you choose the gateway we just installed to connect through to our on-premises web API.

• Finally, test the custom connector by actually making a request though the test custom connector UI. If you see a 200 OK response come back, you have successfully managed to accomplish exactly what we had initially set out do.

If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback about the on-premise custom connector capability, please feel free to post below in the comments, in our community, or reach out on Twitter.

The post Connect to custom on-premises APIs using data gateway appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Exporting a flow package

• To export a flow package click on “…” menu, select ‘Export’ then click on ‘Package (.zip)’ .
• On the next screen, provide a name and a description for your package first. You can then configure defaults and add comments in case which will be accessible during the import phase.
• Next, click on the “Export” button in the bottom right corner and your package should start downloading shortly after. If your download doesn’t start automatically, you can also click on the “Download” button.
• You will need the downloaded zip file, when you’re ready to import a flow.

Importing a flow

• To import a flow, first click on the import button in the top right hand corner of the screen.
• Next, upload the package file and wait for the screen to show up the package details
• When configuring the flow settings, you can choose to either create a new flow or update an existing one with the flow definition from the package
• You will also need to select the connections that are required to setup the flow as part of the import process. You should see the Import button light up once you have successfully configured all the required settings.

Which resources can be packaged?

When you export a flow, the dependent resources for your flow will also get exported into the package.  With the launch of the packaging preview will only support the export of a subset of all possible resource types as outlined in the table below.

Known limitations

Let us know what scenarios this feature would help you enable, we are always excited to hear from our customers and their success stories using Microsoft Flow.

The post Export and import your flows across environments with packaging appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

1. Provide your own connection to be used with the flow

2. Ask the run-only user to provide the connection to be used with the flow

Let’s take a look at an example scenario to create a button flow – which can simplify the bug filing process for new features being released by our team.

• The button first needs to be configured to capture the bug title and bug description.

• Next, let’s add an action to file a bug in Visual Studio Team Services

• Finally, add a step to send a confirmation email to the person who filed the bug.

In order for this scenario to work, we would like the person invoking the button flow to provide their connection (credentials) to VSO. It would be far from ideal for the owner for the flow to be marked as the creator of all the bugs. With the new feature, we can now configure the invoker to provide the VSO connection, to do this first save your flow and navigate to the properties page.

• Click on Add another user in the Manage Run-Only Users tile

• Add the users with whom you’d like to share the flow.

• In the Connections used section, click on the dropdown under Visual Studio Team Services and configure it to be “Provided by run-only user”

• For the Office 365 Outlook connection, configure it to use your own connection, if you want the confirmation email to be sent using your own account.

When a run-only user invokes a button flow they will be asked to provide their own Visual Studio Team Services connection, after which they can use the button to file bugs.

Let us know what scenarios this feature would help you enable, we are always excited to hear from our customers and their success stories using Microsoft Flow.

The post Manage connection access while sharing button flows to enable richer scenario appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The folks at Muhimbi have a service that allows you to convert Microsoft Word files to PDF, add watermarks, merge documents, etc., and now you can automate all of these operations using Flow. Muhimbi started off building a custom API for their service, and then worked with us to make it a publicly available integrated service. (If you are interested in integrating your service with Flow, like Muhimbi did, check out our blog on SASS app connectors.

Muhimbi has written a great blog post on how to use Flow to convert, merge, and secure files, which we are sharing below.

————

If you have been paying close attention to our recent posts, you may have noticed that we have fallen a little bit in love with Microsoft’s new Flow product. (See our previous posts on Attaching PDF files to emails and Moving files between SharePoint Online site collections). Flow is a simple but elegant Workflow Engine that works well in combination with SharePoint Online, but can also be used to integrate with non-SharePoint systems including OneDrive, DropBox, SalesForce, and now ……

Our previous posts have focused on how standard out-of-the-box Flow functionality can be used to post-process files generated by our SharePoint Online Workflow actions. However, we are not exaggerating when we say that we are extremely excited to announce that all Muhimbi’s workflow actions are now available for Microsoft Flow as well as part of the new Muhimbi PDF Converter Services Online product line.  That’s right, you can now Convert, Merge, Watermark, Secure and OCR files directly in Microsoft Flow in combination with any other Flow service provider.

Convert all files uploaded to OneDrive, watermark and secure them, and write the generated file to DropBox? No problem. Automatically archive all approved SharePoint Files in PDF/A format to Google Drive? Even easier. The sky is the limit.

Functionality

So how does this work? We’ll go into a great level of detail during the next few weeks and months, but the summary is as follows.

In Flow’s editor, the Muhimbi actions show up in the same way as other built-in services such as SharePoint, DropBox, and SalesForce. All Muhimbi workflow actions that our customers are already used to — including various conversion, merge, watermarking, security and OCR actions — are displayed in Flow’s list of actions.

Let’s take the Convert Document action as an example. All it takes is the name of the source file, which is typically available from the Flow Trigger that started the workflow, and the file’s content, which tends to be available from the same trigger as well. The Output format defaults to PDF, but — depending on the input format — you can select different output formats as well.

Although there are some other fields available under Show advanced options, that is basically all there is to it.

An example of a completed Flow can be found below. It is basic but powerful and can easily be extended to take files from different sources (SharePoint, Box.com, Google Drive<), carry out multiple operations by feeding the converted document into other Muhimbi actions to watermark and secure the generated PDF, and then send the generated file not only by email but also into SharePoint, DropBox or any of the other gazillions of services that integrate with Flow.

1. The flow is triggered when a file is uploaded to a particular OneDrive folder.
2. The file name and file content provided by the OneDrive trigger are fed into the Convert Document action.
3. The converted file is attached to an email and sent out.

Similar to other Flow actions, each Muhimbi action returns a number of output parameters that can be consumed by other actions in the same Flow. The following screenshot shows how the generated PDF file is attached to the email:

We have made sure that all our Flow actions work in a similar fashion. For detailed information see this Core Concepts Knowledge Base Article.

Pricing

Similar to our SharePoint Online subscription service, a free 30 day trial is available for this new product as well. The first time any of our actions are used, Microsoft Flow requires a connection to be setup with your Muhimbi subscription. Just follow the basic instructions when going through that process and all will be setup in minutes.

If you wish to use the workflow actions beyond the 30 day trial, you will need to subscribe to one of our plans. Pricing and functionality exactly matches the pricing for our SharePoint Online subscriptions.

Please note that there is no need to purchase separate subscriptions for both the PDF Converter for SharePoint Online and PDF Converter Services Online (as used by Flow). The same subscription can be used from both SharePoint Online and Flow, just make sure that during registration you enter the Tenancy ID of your SharePoint Online environment (See this KB article for details) to link the two. Please keep in mind that operations carried out by both products are shared and come from your existing monthly allotment.

————

If you would like us to showcase your flows, please reach out to us on our social media handle @MicrosoftFlow, or in the comments sections below!

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Use Microsoft Flow to Convert, Merge, Watermark, Secure, and OCR files appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.