Automate the backup of your Flow & Power Apps canvas application

Microsoft Power Automate & Power Apps have turned quite important & popular service now a days within Office 365, there are many users (developers & IT pro users) who are creating business applications leveraging these services very quickly but if an app or a flow is deleted by mistake then its not an easy job to spin it back up with out involving Microsoft support. In this blog post, am going to give you some ideas to back up a Flow & Power Apps automatically with the help of connectors available in Power automate. Once it is backed up, I will show you steps to restore from the back up.

Once I’ve deleted a flow accidentally and I was not able to restore it back, I have recreated the complete flow with all the steps which took some time. I will show you steps to back up & restore your Flow & Power Apps.

Backup & Restore your Flow
Backup & Restore your Power Apps

Backup & Restore your Flow:

A flow could be backed up by copying the flow definition & connection references with the help of an action “Get Flow” under the flow connector “Power Automate Management”. With the flow definition & connector references we would be able to restore it back whenever needed. Thanks to John Liu for the tips & guidance on showing us a way to copy the flow definition. Before showing you steps to get the flow definition & connection references, I will show you some examples on the type of information it stores on these fields.

Flow Definition:

It has details about the triggers & actions used with in a flow in a JSON format.

Triggers: Information about the trigger used in the flow (Instant, Automatic, Scheduled)

Actions: Information about all actions used in the flow

Connection References:

It has details about all connections used against each action

Add the action “Get Flow” under connector “Power Automate Management“, which has the fields flow definition & connection references.

Find below the list of actions under the Power Automate management connector

This action would be able to get only the flows to which you have access to. If you don’t see the flow under the drop down, enter the Flow ID by selecting custom value.

Now let’s store the Flow definition & connection references to a file in some location so that we would be able to retrieve the files for restoration. On this example I will use “One Drive for business connector” action “Create File” to store the content in two files but you can also get it stored on SharePoint Document Library, Azure Blob, GitHub etc. The extension of these files can also be .txt but I’ve used .json.

Restore Flow:

Flow action “Create Flow” helps us to restore flow from the flow definition & the connection references stored on One drive. Only the file content should be passed for the Flow Definition, connectionReferences and not the actual file.

Backup & Restore your Power App:

A Power App could be backed up by creating a MSAPP file for the PowerApp to be backed up. The file with extension .msapp is just a ZIP file which has all the definitions of the app. There are open source tools (Review Tool, Theme editor, App merger, Phone to tablet converter) available in github which helps us to peek at the definitions of the .msapp file.

PowerApps for App Makers connector has an action called “Get App” which helps us to get all the information related to the specified app. This action has a field called “readonlyValue”. It points to a link that has the PowerApps msapp file. With the help of the premium connector HTTP, we will make a GET request to the readonlyValue link (Blob storage path). This step allows you to retrieve the contents of the msapp file which could then be stored as a backup file in Onedrive, SharePoint, Github etc. Lets now look at the contents of the msapp file, change the extension of the .msapp file to .zip file and open it.

Assets	All the media files (Images, Videos, Audio)
Controls	Information about all the controls (First Party, Custom components etc) used in the different screens of the app. Data is in JSON format.
References	Information about Datasources, Templates (Label, Gallery, Textbox etc), Resources (Images etc), Themes used in the app etc
Resources	Publish information, user locale etc
Properties.json	Information of the app like Author, PowerApp name, no of screens etc

Add the action “Get App”, enter the App ID of the Power App

This action retrieves all the information of the app including the “readonlyvalue” as explained above. Using this result we will make a GET request using the HTTP connector to retrieve the app data in this Flow.

Add the action “Create file” in OneDrive for Business connector and set the body from HTTP connector. This allows you to save your app to OneDrive for Business. As said earlier you can instead store it to other storage like Azure Blob Storage, SharePoint document library, GitHub etc.

Restore Power App:

The msapp file is with us now, lets now restore the PowerApp. Create a Blank app from the Power Apps studio then open the.MSApp file via the File > Open > Browse menu option. This enables you to select the .MSApp file from your local file system then save & publish the App. The app is now back. Let me know on the comment section if there is a automated way to restore the PowerApp from the MSApp file.

Summary: On this blog post, we have seen ways to backup & restore your app & flow using a Flow. If you are an Power App/Power Automate environment admin (Premium license), you could backup all the apps & flow available in the environment using the Apps for Admin connector. There are Power Shell cmdlets available for Admins & creators which could also be used. If you have a more complex business application including PowerApps Canvas, multiple flows, custom connector, Model driven apps, entity etc, solutions is recommended. Exporting a solution as a package is very easy by click of a button, restoring is also quite an easy task. Hope you find this post useful, let me know your feedback on the comments section.

Managing users for a Power App with SharePoint as a data source

In this blog post, I am going to show you how to manage users for a Power App which has SharePoint as a data source. Let’s take an example, you’ve built a Power App application which has its data stored in SharePoint. After the application is developed, you want to share the app with some users. To do so you’ll have to give the user access to

PowerApps
Access to the Data source (SharePoint in this case), it could be Read/Write based on the use case

Only after the user has been granted access, they would be able to use the application. To setup the process for managing users we are going to use an action “Edit App Role Assignment” under the connector “PowerApps for App Makers” in the flow. Find the steps to executed to make this happen

Create an Interface/screen for the Admins in PowerApps (custom role) to maintain (Add/Remove) the users of the application
Flow for granting access to the users
1. Action to grant access to the PowerApps
1. Action to add the user to the SharePoint site

Step 1: Create an Interface for the Admins in PowerApps to manage the users for the application

Create a list (User Roles) on the SharePoint site which acts as a data source for application with the below schema to maintain the users

Column	Type
UserName	Person or Group
Role	Choice (value: Admin, User)
RoleStatus	Single line of text (Default value: Add)

List Schema for UserRoles

Add a screen on the Power App as shown on the image below. I’ve given some information on the image the type of controls I’ve added on the screen. This screen will be shown only to the Admin role, the navigation to this screen could be based on click of a button placed somewhere on the screen. The visibility of the button to navigate to the admin interface could be set based on the data (Role) from the list User Roles list. In this example, I will have two roles an Admin and User. Find the below screen in PowerApp built for managing the users

Once the user name and the role has been entered on the section 1, click add which adds the user information to the list User Roles. Once a user is added, the flow will be triggered which has actions to grant access for a Power App.

Step 2: Flow for granting access to the users

I will be using a flow to grant access to PowerApp & SharePoint site. Let’s build the automated flow with trigger “When an item is created or modified” connected to the list User Roles

Add the action “Get User profile”, the input should be the email address of the user who must be given access to PowerApp. This step is required to get the user guid, to be given on a later step for granting access to PowerApp action

Now Add the action “Edit App Role Assignment” under the connector “PowerApps for App Makers”, this action is in preview mode by the time I am writing this post. To get more details on the different actions and its parameters with this connector go through this link. Make sure the connection to this action has access (Owner/Co-Owner) to share an App to a user. You would be able to get the GUID (App ID) of the Power App by going to the details section of an app.

Now let’s add an action to grant the user access to SharePoint site. I would be using a flow action “Send an HTTP request to SharePoint” to call a Rest API (POST) to get the user added to the SP site groups (Members/Viewers/Visitors). The connection for this action should have access (Site Owner) to share the site. Find the rest api details to add the user to a group

URI: _api/web/sitegroups(groupId)/users

Method: POST

Request Body: {‘LoginName’:’i:0#.f|membership|Emailaddressoftheuser’}

To get the SharePoint group id, navigate to the url https://domainname.com/sites/sitename/_layouts/15/user.aspx and click the group name and copy the URL which will have the groupid at the end.

https://domainname/sites/sitename/_layouts/15/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=3

Find the action with the configurations

Execute the flow by adding the user to the list from the PowerApps interface, the flow gets triggered which will in turn grant the user access to PowerApp & SharePoint. Tada!!!

To revoke the access to a user, if you scroll back to the admin interface image for managing the user there is a delete button. Assume that the delete button click will update the column status on the User Roles list to “Revoke” for a user which would then trigger the same flow. On the same flow add a Switch which would then based on the value in the RoleStatus (Add/Revoke) column, add steps to revoke the access. This could be achieved in multiple ways. For e.g After the delete button is clicked the item on the UserRoles list can be deleted which will in turn call a flow created using the trigger “When an Item is deleted” with actions to revoke access

Action to Revoke Power App access, its the same action we used for adding user to an app but with some different parameters as shown below

The rest api details for revoking the user access from a SharePoint group

URI: _api/web/sitegroups(groupId)/users/removeByLoginName

Method: POST

Request Body: {‘loginName’:’i:0#.f|membership|Emailaddressoftheuser’}

The action to grant access to Power App can also be called from a Power App by creating a connection to the data source “PowerAppsforAppMakers” as below

Summary:This approach would help the super users of the app to manage user permissions for the Power App within Power Apps interface. On this post we have seen adding the user permission to SharePoint data source. Based on needs there should be ways to add users to different data sources if there’s an api endpoint or with the help of standard connectors available in Power Platform. Let me know any feedback or comments on the comment section below

Get attendees details of a meeting event using Power Automate/MS Flow

Its fairly easy to create an event using Power automate in Office 365 Outlook using the action Create Event but there is no action to get the attendees details on who has Accepted, tentatively accepted, Declined & No response if you are trying to automate.

MS Graph comes to the rescue to get the attendees details, there is an endpoint available to fetch the attendee’s details of an outlook event.

Let’s assume you are creating Outlook Event using flow action Create Event which has a connection using a different account (For e.g a service account with mailbox enabled). After the event is created the Event ID (Unique ID of an Event) is stored on a SharePoint Custom list or SQL etc to get the attendees information.

Before you start, you need to make sure you have the following:

Access to an Office 365 tenant with administrative access to Azure AD
Access to create flows in Microsoft Flow

Step 1 – Create an Application in Azure AD with API permissions to Calendar

You will need to register an application within Azure AD.

Navigate to Azure Active Directory from https://portal.azure.com and select App registrations. Select New registration. I am not going to list the steps required to create an Application in Azure AD, there are lot of blog posts & Microsoft articles which covers the steps. For this requirement, Redirect URI is not required to filled on the Azure app.

To get authorized to call Microsoft Graph in Power Automate/MS Flow, we’ll need the following information:

Tenant ID
Client ID
Client secret
API Permission to Read Calendar
Token Endpoint

Once the application is created, go to the API Permissions. To configure application permissions for the AD app to get the event information, API permission to the Calendar is required. Find the steps below to grant read permission to the calendar

Click on the API Permissions menu item in the navigation panel.
Click on the Add a Permission button.
Click Microsoft Graph under the tab Microsoft APIs.
Click on the Application Permissions button.
Expand the Calendars section.
Select the Calendars.Read option. This step gives access to the app for reading all the calendars in the mailboxes across the tenant.
Click on the Add Permissions button.
Click on the Grant Admin Consent button.
Click on the Yes button to confirm consent.

I use the Graph Explorer https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/graph-explorer# to test & explore different endpoints.

This explorer will not work for delegated permissions since it uses your permissions to access the API endpoint but you can use Postman to test the graph endpoint with the Oauth authentication.

Find the documentation for the different endpoints available for Calendar in the link

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/event-get?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http

For this requirement we are interested in the following HTTP request/endpoint to the get details of a different user using the version 1.0

GET /users/{id | userPrincipalName}/calendar/events/{id}

Step 2 – Create a Flow

With the Azure AD application created, you have to create a flow using it. You could even create a Azure logic Apps. Find the steps below to create a scheduled flow

First, go to https://flow.microsoft.com and go to My flows. Select New > Create Scheduled-from blank to create a new flowThis flow will be running on scheduled basis to get the attendees details.

Call the token endpoint of the tenant’s Azure AD which will provide us an access token for Microsoft Graph in return for the information contained in the request body. Use the Flow action HTTP which is premium action to make a HTTP post request for getting a token.

Before we construct the HTTP request, we need encode the client secret to avoid having URL unsafe characters:

encodeUriComponent(variables('ClientSecret'))

The HTTP method	POST
The request URL	https://login.microsoftonline.com/your tenant id/oauth2/v2.0/token
The Content-Type header	application/x-www-form-urlencoded
The request body	tenant=tenantID&client_id=clientID&client_secret=@{decodeUriComponent(variables(‘ClientSecret’))}&grant_type=client_credentials&scope=https://graph.microsoft.com/.default

The token endpoint URL can be obtained from the AD App by clicking on the Endpoint link as shown below

When the above HTTP request is made, we get authenticated, and in the response, we’ll receive the access token for calling Microsoft Graph. Before we can use the access token, we need to parse the JSON in the response body to make the token available to us in the dynamic content panel

The next step is to the parse the JSON response of the HTTP – Get Access token action and get the token type and access token to make a call to the Graph endpoint. To do this Add the action Parse JSON

The Content has to be the Body of the action HTTP – Get Access token and to build the schema.
Run the flow, copy the outputs [Body] of the action HTTP – Get Access token
Click the button Generate from Sample, paste the Body and click Done. These steps will generate the schema automatically

The next step is to call the Graph endpoint using the HTTP action with the token type & access token on the Headers obtained from the above method

GET URI: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/useremailaddress/calendar/events/eventID/attendees

Event ID should be the ID of the event you would like to get the attendees information and Headers information is constructed from the Parse JSON – Access token.

Run the Flow, you will now have the attendee’s information in the JSON format as shown below. The JSON will have information about the users details and the responses. JSON Parse action could be used to parse the JSON and get the information as per the requirement

Hopefully you enjoyed reading this article and find it useful.

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Step 2 – Create a Flow

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