8. Miscellaneous Topics
In this lecture, we’ll talk about some miscellaneous topics in Power Automate flows. So, first, we can install the Power Automate app on our mobile device and begin performing various actions. Some of the tasks you can complete with the mobile app include turning off and on the flows. See when the flow has failed, review the detailed run history of reports, and view and filter runs by notification types. Now, this is the Power Automate menu. So if you go to Power Automate, which is this URL that is mentioned on the slide, this is the menu you see. So let’s look at this menu. The first are action items. This is where you manage approvals and business. Process flows.
As you expand this, you will notice approvals and business process flows. Then you have my flow. Where your flows are located Kate helps you create new flow templates, where you can look at some of the most popular templates. This helps you create some of the nice flows very easily. Then there are connectors, which are used to connect one service to another. So let’s look at some connectors. So if you go to Connectors, you will see that you can connect to external data sources like Office 365, SharePoint, and Twitter. Data is where you get access to your tables, connections, custom connectors, and gateways. We’ll learn more about gateways in our next slide. And this is the URL for flow. You can access flow through Power apps, but you can also use this URL. Also, solutions is where you manage your solutions, and learn is where you find the information that will quickly ramp up on Power Automate. Now, basically, gateways are ways to communicate data between your on-premises data solutions and the cloud.
So on-premises data gateways act as a bridge to provide quick and secure data transfer between on-premises data and several Microsoft cloud services. This is how a screen looks where we don’t have any gateways yet. You can then share your flows with other users. So what you have to do is look at any of the flows there, and you will see a share button. Assume you have this one and a belly button. If you click here, you can add users here, and you can share your flow with somebody else. Now, there are two types of connections: embedded and other. So embedded connections are used in the flow, while other connections are defined for the flow, but they may or may not be used in it. As a result, they can be used in a variety of flows. Now, here are some of the limits. Each account can have up to 50 flows. You can have up to 15 custom connectors. You can have up to 20 connections per API and 100 total connections. Now, you can install the gateway only in your default environment, and some connectors, like Twitter, give you a lot of data. So throttles are implemented to control the quality of service.
So if there’s too much data, some of the data will not be processed. So in those cases, your flow will fail, and if your flows are failing, you can review the details of the run in the flow run history. Now, there are complex flows. Complex flows basically use some of the data available while you’re creating your flow. Data is similar to GPS data, email, or other forms of electronic communication. Now, this information is available as trigger tokens, and trigger tokens are data points that are known and available to the device that a button flow is running on. So whenever you create a flow, this information is present in the action steps. These tokens change based on factors such as the current time and the current geographic location of the device. Now, for flows to a synchronization, this is not supported, which means you cannot update the data back because if you do that, it will create an infinite loop and your flow will go into an infinite loop. So changes you make in the destination aren’t copied back to the source, and if you try to set up two-way synchronization, maybe using two flows, then it will create an infinite loop. Now these are the parameters available, so once you are accessing a flow from a mobile device or from a laptop, you have information like city, country, full address, latitude, longitude, postal code, state, street timestamp, date, username, and user email, and these parameters can be used to create complex flows. Now, we can see templates in our apps menu by clicking on “new flow templates,” and if you have templates here also, it will take you to the same place. So these are some of the templates available. So that’s the end of it. In this lecture, we talked about some of the misleading topics in Power automate flows. Thank you.
9. Install Desktop Flows
In this lecture, we’ll see how to install desktop flows. We are talking about this because there’s a whole section under Create and Manage Power Automate to build desktop flows so you can install them using your Flows. On the top right-hand corner, you will see “Install Power Automate Desktop.” So, if you go to Flows in the upper right corner, you must install and activate Automate Desktop.
This will download an exe file, which you’ll have to run. So once you run it, you will get the screen for the installation package. Then you get installed. You have to select this to agree to the terms. It is preferable to select everything, which is to install Edge WebDriver and Chrome driver, then install a shortcut, and collect usage data. This option is changeable after installation; it will also display a progress bar before declaring your installation successful. And then you have to install a Power Automate extension. You can install for either Edge or Firefox and then restart your computer. So once you install your extension, you will get an icon like this and this.
Is the automate power extension Then, after you restart, you will see an icon. So this is the added edge. You just click on “Get,” and it will give you a pop-up to add an extension. Then it will say “add it.” And this is the screen we just showed. And it will create a Power Auto shortcut on your desktop. And once you open it up, you will have to sign in using your credentials. And this is the Power Desktop flow screen. So this is what it looks like. Currently, I have not created any flows, but we’ll talk about them in our later lectures, and that’s it. So your desktop flow is installed, and then we can work on it and learn more about it. Thank you.
10. Unattended Flows
We’ll talk about power automation in unattended mode in this lecture. So this is related to the exam objective of differentiating between attended and unattended desktop flows. So in attendant, you need a human to monitor the flow, and in attendance, you don’t need a human; it runs automatically. So an attendant requires human interactions or decisions while unattended. No human interaction or decision is required. Attended is manually triggered, and this one is automatically triggered. And here we don’t need to sign in because automation assumes the system is already signed in. And here Windows sign-in is automated with predefined user credentials.
So you must sign in before the automation can run, and users must be in front of their computers. The process might require human interaction or decisions between steps. An attendant-designated computer or server is set up to run automation on behalf of a user. No interaction or decision is made by a human. How you set it up So for it to run smoothly, all users should be logged out completely. It cannot be run. If the user is logged in, you should lock the screen so that nobody else sees the actions being performed. And you need to have a gateway. Gateway, as we discussed earlier, is a connection between online and cloud data sources. So you need to have a gateway, and you need to be signed in to your gateway for it to run properly. Now, here are some of the best practices. If your flow is waiting for more than 3 hours, it will time out. And if you want to run multiple flows, you have to either plan to run them at different times of the day, run them on a virtual machine, or use two different accounts and use those two accounts to run two flows. Because you cannot currently run two flows with one user, you can set up a cluster of devices on which flows can run. So this is all about unintended flows, how to set them up, and what the best practises are. Thank you.
11. Buttons
We’ll learn about buttons in this lecture. So with buttons, what you can do is install the Power Automate application on your mobile device, and then you can create buttons and link a Power Automate flow to that button. So there are three types of power automation buttons. One is an app-based virtual button with no user input. Then you have app-based, which is a virtual button with user input-triggered tokens, and then you have physical buttons. So instead of a button on a mobile app, you can buy it as a physical device from Flick, IO, or BTTN, and then you can programmer it to run a power automation flow and press that physical button.
Now, when you run a flow from virtual buttons on a smartphone, a date, time, and the current address where the phone is located are automatically available for use. These are all parameters you have available for use when you’re using buttons like city, country, full address, latitude, longitude, postal code, state, street timestamp, date, username, and user email. Once you create a button on mobile, you can share the button as well. So you select the button icon, and then on the bottom right, you should see three lectures. And then you have two options: invite others or share the button link.
To invite others, enter their email address, and then share that link in the shared button link so that the person can use it before coming to troubleshooting. So, if a flow fails, you have three possible reasons. One user is not authorized. Second, there’s a problem with your data connection, and third, there’s some issue with actions or conditions. So you can look at the issues with actions and conditions when you go to a flow, and there you can see if it has run successfully or if it has errored out. So, coming to user input, there are six types of input: text (yes, no, file, email number, and date). So when you create a flow, you can have these six types of inputs to your flow.
Now, you can use flow to create an item on SharePoint. So what you have to do is let us look at it. Suppose I create a flow, and I’ll name it “test flow.” I look for SharePoint, and here I can choose a task to let me look for it to create an item. So I can enter the site address, list name, and create item command here. Then you can also use it to add attachments to your SharePoint list. To SharePoint again, you have an “add attachment” here where you can give the site name, list name ID of the list you want to attach this file to, and file name and content type. So you create a SharePoint list and use Power Automate to add items to the list. So you create a list with all six types of user input allowed, add those to your user inputs, and then create an item with a file attached to link five fields to the SharePoint list. So in this section, you will hardcode the file name just to test it out.
Then you can also set automatic replies to your emails. For that, you have to use Office 365 Outlook. So if you use Office 365 Outlook, you have the option of setting automatic replies. So, once you’ve configured automatic replies, you can change the status to “scheduled,” with a start and end time for both the internal and external reply messages. Then you can create Outlook tasks. So you can see that I made one of low importance. This is a low-importance test task; the status is “in progress,” and the task text is as follows. This is the task. So here I have used the full address and postal code, which will come because they are available for our use, and they will come in your task. So here you have to use Outlook task if you want to use it; you have to use this icon for Outlook task, and here you have created us. So using this, you can create a task. Then, as we discussed before, you can buy physical buttons or order physical buttons from, say, Flick. Then you can create a flow and link it to a button. So once you create a flow, you have to link it to Flick. So you have this option here; let me cancel it and create a new flow.
And we have to choose a trigger. Let us try again. Let me look it up. Okay, we have to create an automated flight cloud flow, and here I can look it up. And here we have an option for Flick. So now, from here, we can link our flow to the flick button. Now here is a sample flick flow. So, whenever a button is pressed, you can get events from the Outlook calendar for the next one that are from now to the next hour, and then for each of the meetings in the calendar, you can send an email to the required attendees informing them that you are running late for the meeting. And then you can send them running late. So, basically, this flow will send an email to everyone who is required for at least any meetings between now and the next one that you are running late for. So if you are running late for a button, you can just press this physical button, and automatically this email will go out because of this flow. If you have a Tvlio account, you can also send an SMS instead of an email. So if you get the account, you need to restore it to video and get the account ID and token if you want to try to send out an SMS. So therefore, you can have these physical buttons, and you can run a flow to an email or SMS by pressing that physical button.
This is how you share a button. So you click on the flow, and you click on Share, where you can put in the email ID or email ID of the person you want to share the button with. Or you can give permission to only run the flow. So you must add that user to the run only users from here list. So, when you share buttons, you also share ownership of the buttons, which gives you full access to all the connections used in the flow. Now, if you want someone else to use your flow but you don’t want him or her to edit the flow, what you can do is export the flow so the other person can import it into his or her power automate. If you are giving run-only access, then flow connections will provide run-only access to this flow, and users will not be able to access your connections outside the flow. So that is the difference between giving run-only access and sharing ownership of the flow. So we learned about buttons in this lecture. Thank you.
12. Flow Control (Desktop Flows)
So, now that we’ve seen it in desktop, let’s return to the presentation: this is related to exam objective implement logic control, and it’s only in desktop, so what action will direct it to another point, and what can we use to go to another point, such as in same flow or any other flow? Labels in our programmer are basically points in our programmer that are used to go to action and exit suffer flow, which will move the control to parent flow, and one suffer action will run another soft flow, and when the Suffolk completes, it will return to the original soft flow. final soft flow.
So these are screenshots for your reference This is a command, so comments don’t affect the functionality of the flow. This is how we create a label. This is a go-to where? In the drop-down, we’ll have all the labels. We can add a server and give it a name. We can run a test from our main flow. We can automatically exit a Suffolk County patient after their last action. You can stop a flow, and when you’re stopping, you can stop successfully or with an error message. You can create error handling for flow errors. So you can name it.
And then you can throw an error when an error occurs, so the programmer will terminate abnormally. Or you can continue running with these four actions. Or you can create these two rules. Let us talk about them. So you can set a variable, specify a variable, and assign a value to it. You can run any soft flow. You can go to the next action. This is the next action on which, on a particular action, an error occurred. So it goes to the next action, and repeat action on that produced an error. Go to the beginning of the block and go to the end of the block. So this is what it looks like. This is what our server flow looks like. This is what our brain’s flow looks like. We now have all of the information we need on blockerror and the other commands we discussed. This is all about flow control. Thank you.
13. Analytics
In this lecture, we’ll talk about flow analytics and how to start and stop a flow. So let’s go here. Here, if I click on these three dots, I have the option to turn it off, and now it is turned off. You see this icon here, and it is disabled. I can also then turn it back on, and it is now enabled again. This is how to turn off and turn on a flow. Then we can look at the analytics for this flow.
So you have an option for analytics; once it goes to analytics, it shows three tabs: actions, usage, and errors. “Actions” is how many times my flow has been run. So my flow has been run two times in the past 30 days, and here you can change the filter for the past 30 days, 14 days, or seven days. Then there’s the usage of my flow. It will show me three graphs: the number of runs, the number of runs by day, and the number of successful runs flow runtrends; then I can go to errors. This particular type will not show me anything because I did not have any error runs for this particular flow. So this shows empty data, but then it shows errors by day and errors by type, and here it will show each error detail, and you have action, trigger, and error type. So this is about analytics and how to begin a flow stop. So this is related to the objective of activating and deactivating flow. You can toggle it on and off from the flows. Then we have an objective exam on interpreting flow analytic data.
So if you go to Analytics, it has three sections. This is the Actions tab, which displays the total number of actions requested by day and includes a filter. Then you have a usage step, total runs, number of runs, flow, run trends, and again filter type, and then errors, errors by date type details, action triggers, and error type, and again filter. So that was all about starting and stopping a flow and analytics. Thank you.
14. Power Automate – Dataverse Actions
We’ll talk about various data warehouse operations you can do from Power Automate in this lecture. So let’s have a look. You have the power to automate flow. If you create a new step, you have a lot of operations, and if you select Microsoft Data Warehousing, these are all the actions available to you. So we’ll talk about each of them in detail. And then, if you say “data operations,” you can perform various data operations listed here. So we’ll talk about them also. So it’s important to understand all of the database and data operations available in Power BI. As a result, you can create extremely complex and powerful power automation flows. So you can add a new row to a database table. You can delete a row. You can download a file or image from the database. You can get a row using the row ID. You can list rows based on a search condition.
So list the rows in the database table that match the selected action. Perform a bound action on a specific table. So perform an action associated with the selected table. Unbound action is not linked to a table; it is linked to the environment as a whole. You can perform AI on your database by predicting actions available in the environment that are not associated with any table. Relate rows is basically a way to link to related records. Suppose you want to link and associate a contact record with an account record. so you can use related rows. So it allows you to link rows in one table to another. If a table has one too many or many too many relationships, an unrelated table is used to remove the relationship that we have set. Search rows allow you to do a relevant search. So searching an environment for relevant terms and then updating a row will update a row. You can upload a file like you would download one here. You can edit the file by uploading it to the database. That request is basically a batch request. So you perform a group of dataverse connector operations in a single transaction. If one operation fails, all the successful actions are rolled back. So you perform a set of operations as a batch, and all should be successful. This is relevant if you are doing a banking transaction. Suppose you want to debit one account and credit one account. So you want to do both transactions as a batch.
So these are all the data war separations. Here we see how it looks for a bound action. For a production, you have to mention the tablename, row ID, and the action you are taking. An unbound action, on the other hand, only has an action name in the environment. But these are all the data operations you can do now. Compose will allow you to join multiple inputs to produce one result. So, if you build an object from action inputs, you can output a CSV or HTML table. You can filter an array based on a condition. Join lets you join all the elements of an array into a string, and you can specify join with a string that will be a separator for all the elements in that array. You can parse a JSON document and select the specified properties. So, if you have a collection with many properties, the select operation allows you to select only specified properties from the array and place them in a new array. So these are all the operations available for database and data operations, and it is good to be aware of them. Thank you.
