Flow

Function Friday - Collection Functions: Contains, Item, Join

For the last group of collection functions, we’re taking a look at the functions that focus on the items in the collection itself. Contains The contains function details whether or not a collection contains a specific element. The result is a boolean value (true/false). The pattern is as follows: contains('collection', 'value') contains([collection], 'value') The exact way it works depends on what the collection is. If the collection is a string, the contains function works to find a substring of characters.

Friday, June 17, 2022 | 2 minutes Read

Function Friday - Collection Functions: Intersection, Union, Skip, Take

For the second batch of collection functions we’re taking a look at the functions that let you work with the collections themselves. These functions let you slice, dice, and merge one or more collections together. Intersection The intersection function compares two or more collections and returns a new array that contains only the elements that exist in all the passed in collections. The format is as follows: intersection(collection1, collection2, ...) As with all the functions, you can pass in collection variables or literals, and strings are treated as character arrays.

Friday, June 10, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Function Friday - Collection Functions - First, Last, Empty, Length

Power Automate contains excellent support for working with collections of objects. Generally, these will be treated as arrays of objects. However, these functions will also work with strings as, in Power Automate, strings are also considered a collection, as they are essentially an array of characters. As such, Power Automate contains a good selection of functions for working with these collections. For my return to functions in Power Automate, we’ll take a look at the first group of collection functions: First, last, empty, and length.

Friday, June 3, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

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Function Friday - More Math

I previously covered some of the base math functions available. This time I’ll cover the math functions that are related to working with arrays of numbers. This includes the max, min, rand, and range functions. max & min These two functions work the exact same way. The max function returns the largest number in an array of numbers, and the min function returns the smallest number in an array of numbers. The format is as follows:

Friday, April 8, 2022 | 2 minutes Read

Easily Create New Bulk Work Items From a Spreadsheet

There are a lot of ways to keep track of work items: Azure DevOps, Trello, Jira, and so on. One thing they all have in common is that it can be tedious to create a bunch of work items at once. It can be a lot easier to just create a huge list of work items in a spreadsheet, especially at the beginning of a project when you’re brainstorming all the various requirements and features to be included.

Tuesday, April 5, 2022 | 6 minutes Read

Function Friday - Slice and Split

This week I’m returning to some of the string manipulation functions: slice and split. slice The slice function is essentially an enhanced version of the substring function. The pattern for the function is as follows: slice(string, startIndex, endIndex) The first parameter is the string to be examined. As always this can be a string literal, a variable, or the output from a previous trigger or action. The second is the startIndex. Unlike the substring function, if the startIndex value is greater than the length of the string, an empty string is returned instead of an error. You can also pass in a negative value for your startIndex. Doing so will count backward from the end of the string and start looking there. For example:

Friday, April 1, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Copy Events From One Calendar To Another

I recently began offering mentoring sessions for developers who were just getting started in their careers. Calendly offers a great way to allow people to sign up for sessions that fit into my calendar. And while it’s great that it will check two calendars for my availability, it won’t add the event to multiple calendars. But that doesn’t fit into my needs. I wanted the events to be created on my personal Outlook calendar for various reasons, but I also wanted the events added to my work Outlook calendar so I don’t get double-booked with both work and personal events. Power Automate to the rescue once more!

Tuesday, March 29, 2022 | 4 minutes Read

Function Friday - Logical Comparisons

Similar to most programming languages, Power Automate contains a number of logical functions for comparing values. These include: and, equals, greater, greaterOrEquals, if, less, lessOrEquals, not, or. Most of these functions work in the same general manner. The function name is passed two or more parameters. The parameters may be single values or expressions, such as the following: @equals('There', 'Their') //returns false @and(equals('hello', 'goodbye'), equals(1, 2)) //returns false @less(5, 10) //returns true Let’s go through the various functions.

Friday, March 25, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Function Friday - The String IndexOf's

For this week’s #FunctionFriday, I’m going to cover 3 more string functions. This group is related to searching for a particular block of text within a string: indexOf, lastIndexOf, and nthIndexOf. All three of these functions work pretty much the same way. You pass in the text you are searching for and the text you are searching within, and it tells you whether or not if found a match. Let’s start with the base function: indexOf.

Friday, March 18, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Function Friday - Add, Sub, Mul, Div

One of the weakest areas for Power Automate’s functions is in the math and numbers area. For this week’s #FunctionFriday, I will delve into the first batch of math-related functions, I’m going to cover the basic 4: add (addition), sub (subtraction), mul (multiplication), and div (division). The pattern is basically the same for all of them: add(5.5, 6) //returns 11.5 sub(5.5, .5) //returns 5.0 mul(3, 3) //returns 9 div(9, 3) //returns 3 You have the function name and then two number parameters. And therein lies the most frustrating part of the functions. You can only pass two parameters. If you need to do math with more than two numbers, you have to call the function multiple times. Like so:

Friday, March 11, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Function Friday - Concat & Substring

For the first of my #FunctionFriday posts I’m going to focus on a couple of the most common string functions: concat and substring. concat The first function we’ll look at is concat. This function lets you glue together 2 or more other strings into a single string. The syntax is simple: concat(string 1, string 2, string 3) There isn’t a limit on the number of strings you can combine together, but you have to supply at least 2 arguments. These arguments can be any combination of literal strings, string variables, and string outputs from previous actions in the flow.

Friday, March 4, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Power Automate Connectors: Azure DevOps

One of the many useful connectors available in Power Automate is the connection to Azure DevOps. There is a wide variety of things you can do, including creating and updating tickets, responding to changes in ticket status, or responding to build events or code check-ins. In this post I’ll walk through a couple of examples related to interacting with Azure DevOps. Scenario 1: Creating a work item One of the more useful examples is the ability to quickly create a work item in response to some trigger. In this particular case, we’ll use a Microsoft Form to provide our clients a means of reporting bugs that we’ll use to trigger the creation of a bug in DevOps.

Tuesday, March 1, 2022 | 3 minutes Read