Tag: Microsoft365

Uploading Files Made Easy: A Guide to Using the Attachment Control in Power Apps

The Attachment control in Power Apps is a useful feature that allows users to upload and delete files, but it can only be used with data sources such as SharePoint List or Dataverse table. However, if you need to upload and delete files without using these data sources, you can create a custom component using the Attachment control or you can directly use this control in the app. I have followed the tip from Shane Young in this YouTube video to add the Attachment control to a component library.

By creating a custom component Library for the attachment control, you can upload and delete files similar to a Picture control but with the ability to handle any file type across any apps within an environment. This blog post is not a tutorial on how to create the component, but rather

  • How to use it
  • To Save the file in SharePoint Document Library using Power Automate Flow
  • How to customize the component to fit your needs.

How to use it – Add the Component to the Power Apps:

To incorporate this component into your app, you need to first import it into your environment. Please find below the steps to follow

Step 1: Download the component library from my github repo.

Step 2: Create a Blank Canvas App with a temporary name, on the studio command bar, click on the ellipsis > Click ‘Open’, browse to select the downloaded .msapp package. Save the App and then publish it. You would now be able to see the component from the Component Libraries.

Step 3: After following the instructions outlined in this documentation to import the Published component into your app, the component will be available for use in any app within the environment as shown below.

Step 4: Modify the input parameters of the component to adjust settings such as maximum number of attachments, border colour, attachment size, and other defined parameters of the component.

Step 5: To display the uploaded file content within the app or to send the file to a Power Automate flow, you can incorporate any of the following controls based on the file type:

In the Media Property of the control, the formula to display the file content is

First(FileAttachment_1.Attachments.FileAttachment).Value

The file content will be uploaded to the app as binary data with the URL appres://blobmanager/ for each file uploaded from the attachment control. To get the file Name:

First(FileAttachment_1.Attachments.FileAttachment).Name

Note: In the above screenshot, I have set the Max Attachments Component property to 1 in the Step 4

Send the File to Power Automate:

In order to send or store a file using a Power Automate flow, I needed to convert the file content to Base64 format. To accomplish this, I used a image control to capture the file content in binary format. Here is how I configured the image control:

This control works with any types of files to get the binary content.

After obtaining the binary content of the file using the JSON function, I performed some string manipulations to extract the binary content while excluding the Content-Type. Specifically, I used a combination of Split(), Left() and Last() functions to separate the content into an variable varExtractedFileContent.

Set(varFileContent,JSON(Image2.Image, JSONFormat.IncludeBinaryData));
Set(varExtractedFileContent, Last(Split(varFileContent, ",")).Value);
Set(varExtractedFileContent, Left(varExtractedFileContent, Len(varExtractedFileContent) - 1));

By performing these manipulations, I was able to extract the binary content of the file in a format that could be easily passed to a Power Automate flow or other API or action.

This allowed me to send the file to a Power Automate flow, which could then save the file in a SharePoint library or call some other API or action that required the data to be in Base64 format.

The Power Automate flow used to save the file to a SharePoint Document Library is simple. The flow consists of a Power Apps trigger and a SharePoint action Create File, which takes two input parameters: File Name and File Content.

I have used the base64toBinary() expression to convert the base64-encoded string to binary data. This expression is a prerequisite for the SharePoint create file action and ensures that the file is saved correctly to the SharePoint Document Library.

PowerFx to call the flow from Power Apps:

ProcessAttachments.Run(First(AttachmentComponent_1.Attachments.FileAttachment).Name,varExtractedFileContent);

If you need to upload multiple files to a library using the Attachment control, you can use Gallery control with the Image control, Collections, ForAll function, and the OnAddFile property from the Attachment control. First, create a collection to store the files that are uploaded using the Attachment control using the OnAddFile property. Then, use the Gallery control to load the binary of the uploaded files in the Image control. Next, use the ForAll function to iterate through each file in the gallery and call the Power Automate flow on a button click.

Customizing the Component:

The component I’ve created is a simple one for handling file attachments, but it does not have all the properties from the Attachment control. If you need more customization, you can easily modify it to suit your specific needs by adding additional input or output properties.

To add a new property, you can simply edit the component code and include the new property as an input or output parameter.

By customizing the component in this way, you can tailor it to your specific requirements and ensure that it meets all of your file attachment needs

Summary:

In summary, the Attachment control in Power Apps is a useful feature for uploading and deleting files, but it is limited to certain data sources. To work around this limitation, you can create a custom component using the Attachment control, which allows you to handle any file type and bypass the use of data sources like SharePoint or Dataverse tables. Hope you have found this informational & thanks for reading. If you are visiting my blog for the first time, please do look at my other blogposts.

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How to send an Adaptive card to a Microsoft Teams Private channel using Power Automate flow

Within Microsoft Teams, private channels create focused spaces for collaboration where only the owners or members of the private channel can access the channel. The Microsoft Teams connector in Power Automate has an action to Post an Adaptive card in a chat or channel, which posts an adaptive card as a flow bot to a specific Teams channel. The following error will appear if this action is used to post the card as a Flow bot in the Private channel

Request to the Bot framework failed with error: ‘{“error”:{“code”:”BotNotInConversationRoster”,”message”:”The bot is not part of the conversation roster.”}}’.

The above action will work if the Post as property in the action is changed to User but the creator of this connection has to be a member of the Private channel. This article shows how you can send an Adaptive card to a Private channel using incoming webhooks without being a member of the private channel

Create the Adaptive Card:

An adaptive card facilitates the exchange of UI content in a unified and consistent manner with a simple JSON without the complexity of customizing HTML or CSS. The adaptive card I have used in this example is created from the designer portal. Find below the JSON card payload

{
    "type": "AdaptiveCard",
    "body": [
        {
            "type": "TextBlock",
            "size": "Medium",
            "weight": "Bolder",
            "text": "Adaptive Card in a Private Channel"
        },
        {
            "type": "TextBlock",
            "text": "Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book",
            "wrap": true,
            "color": "Attention"
        }
    ],
    "actions": [
        {
            "type": "Action.OpenUrl",
            "title": "View",
            "url": "https://ashiqf.com"
        }
    ],
    "$schema": "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
    "version": "1.4"
}

Create Incoming Webhook on a Private Channel:

Incoming Webhooks allows external applications to share content within Microsoft Teams channels, in this case the cloud will be the external application sending an Adaptive card message to the private teams channel. You can add and configure an incoming webhook on a private channel by following the instructions on this link from Microsoft. Copy the Incoming webhook URL as mentioned in Step 6 from Microsoft documentation as shown below

Cloud Flow to send the Adaptive Card to a Private Teams channel:

The adaptive card JSON and the Incoming webhook is configured, lets create now create a flow with a HTTP action to send the Adaptive card

Step 1:

Form the HTTP request body for the HTTP action. Replace the Text with the JSON payload of the Adaptive card

{
  "type": "message",
  "attachments": [
    {
      "contentType": "application/vnd.microsoft.card.adaptive",
      "contentUrl": null,
      "content": 
	  Replace the ADAPTIVE CARD JSON PAYLOAD from the designer portal
    }
  ]
}

Step 2:

Add the HTTP action to the cloud flow with the following values against each parameter

Method: POST

URL: Incoming Webhook URLBody: from Step 1

Find below the adaptive card in the Private channel

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Send Teams channel message aka proactive message using custom Teams bot and Power Automate – Part 2

In the last post, we have seen till the installation of the Teams App with the Bot on a Microsoft Team. Let us now continue to send a proactive message, be it an Adaptive card or a simple Text message on a Teams channel using Bot Framework REST API from a Power Automate Cloud Flow.

A proactive message is any message sent by a bot that isn’t in response to a request from a user. Ex: Welcome messages, Notifications, Scheduled messages, Broadcast message etc

Power Automate Cloud Flow:

For this blog post, I have used a Power Automate Instant cloud flow with manual trigger to send the message to a Teams Channel. To follow along the blog post, be ready with the following information

  1. Team ID & Channel ID

This information is required to send the proactive message to a Microsoft Team Channel. To get this information, in Microsoft Teams Client identify the Team channel in scope > Click the ellipsis of the channel in scope > Get link to channel as shown below

After decoding the channel link, the url will be in the format as shown in the below image from which you can get the channel Id and Team group ID

If you are building a Teams broadcaster or communicator application using Power Apps, these information can be stored in Table or a SharePoint list. There are Graph API endpoints which can used to get the Channel Id’s etc.

  1. Bot ID [Part 1 – Step 6]
  2. Bot Secret [Part 1 – Step 7]
  3. Teams Service URL

The service URL is the base URI for all Bot framework API requests. In Teams the service URL will change based on user’s region [EMEA, America, APAC, India etc]. This example delivers messages only on the Team channel and not to the users directly so you can choose the service URL based on the Microsoft 365 Tenant Location. Find below some URL’s based on region

RegionService URL
EMEAhttps://smba.trafficmanager.net/emea/
Americahttps://smba.trafficmanager.net/amer/
Indiahttps://smba.trafficmanager.net/in/
APAChttps://smba.trafficmanager.net/APAC/

All the required information is now available to proceed with sending the channel message using REST API.

Generate Access Token – Bot Framework REST API:

There are SDK’s in Bot Framework for programming languages like .NET, JavaScript, Python etc to handle all conversations for you but an alternative to using the SDK is leveraging Bot Framework REST API. The first step in using the different REST API endpoints from Bot Framework is to generate an access token which is then added to the Authorization header of each API request in this format

Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN

To request an access, make a HTTP request per the following details

Method: POST

Request URL:

https://login.microsoftonline.com/botframework.com/oauth2/v2.0/token

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Body:

grant_type=client_credentials&client_id=botId&client_secret=botSecret&scope=https://api.botframework.com/.default

Replace the botId and botSecret with the values stored from the previous steps. The Bot Id and the secret are from the custom Teams app created based on the previous post.

Add a HTTP Action in your Power Automate flow to add the above details for generating the token

The JWT access token is valid for 24 hours, if the token expires make another request.

Send Teams Channel Message:

The Teams Channel conversation post or proactive message on a channel can now be sent using the REST API to Create Conversation with the access token generated in above step.

Simple Text Message:

Find below the HTTP request detail to send a simple proactive message on a Teams Channel. The conversation Id is the Teams Channel Id

Type: POST

Request URL:

https://smba.trafficmanager.net/emea/v3/conversations/teamsChannelId/activities

Replace teamsChannelId (conversationId) with the actual Team channel Id

Body:

{
  "type": "message",
  "text": "Simple Text Message"
}

Authorization Header: Bearer access_tokenvalue

The Authentication of the HTTP action should be set to Raw, the value should be in the format

Bearer access_token

You can use Parse JSON Action to extract the access token from the previous HTTP action HTTP-GenerateBOTToken or you can directly get the value using the following expression

body('HTTP-GenerateBOTToken')?['access_token']

The above HTTP request will create a HTTP response with the activity id which can be potentially used to send a reply etc.

Adaptive Card Message:

Adaptive cards are platform-agnostic snippets of UI authored in JSON that different Microsoft apps and services like Teams, Outlook can use. It can be designed using the Adaptive Card designer portal. To send an Adaptive to a Teams Channel, everything else remains the same when comparted with above give HTTP request for the Simple Text message except the Body as below

{
  "type": "message",
  "attachments": [
    {
      "contentType": "application/vnd.microsoft.card.adaptive",
      "content": {
       "msTeams": {
          "width": "full"
        },
        Replace the ADAPTIVE CARD JSON PAYLOAD from the designer portal
      }
    }
  ]
}

You can get the complete body of request from this Link. This method can be used to send the message on any standard channel but not on Private Teams channel, Microsoft has not opened the possibility to send a channel message on private channel using a Bot. Find below adaptive card message posted on the Teams Channel from the Power Automate flow

Summary:

There are lot of possibilities with the Bot connector service REST API, what I have shown above is only an endpoint to send a message in a Teams Channel. Look at this documentation on the available conversation operations like Reply, Delete, Update conversation etc. Using this approach you can build a Company broadcaster app with the possibility of reaching out to multiple Teams without the user being the member or owner of the Team. If you are visiting my blog for the first time, please do look at my other blogposts.

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How to create & setup Dynamic Microsoft 365 Group or Distribution list based on the user’s domain for Teams, Yammer and Exchange

There are many organizations maintaining multiple domains on a single Microsoft 365 or Azure AD tenant, in those cases there might be a need to create dynamic Microsoft 365 groups, security groups & distributions list based on the user’s domain to manage the group’s membership. On this blogpost, let us see how to

  1. Create Dynamic Microsoft 365 group based on the user’s domain for Teams & Yammer
  2. Create a Dynamic distribution list based on user’s domain in Exchange online

To begin with let us see some basics of a Dynamic group. The membership of a dynamic group will automatically update as people join, leave, or move within the organization whenever the user’s Azure Active Directory attributes are changed. In simple terms, rules determines the group membership. The users will be added or removed automatically as and when the user attributes change or users join and leave the tenant which reduces the administrative effort of adding and removing users from a group. Dynamic group can be created based on variety of attributes including role, location, department etc.

Create Dynamic Microsoft 365 group based on the user’s domain for Teams & Yammer

Microsoft Teams and Yammer (Microsoft 365 Connected) supports dynamic membership. It enables the membership of Team or Yammer to be defined by one or more rules that check for certain attributes in Azure AD. Microsoft Teams & Yammer creates a Microsoft 365 group in Azure AD. For this post, the membership rule will be simple one which is based on the user’s domain and country. You can also have a complex rule involving multiple Azure AD attributes like Title, Geography, Department etc. Before we proceed further, there are some pre-requisite & facts to be considered before creating a dynamic group.

  • User Administrator or Global administrator role in Azure AD
  • Users you foresee to be part of a dynamic group membership rule should have an Azure AD premium License P1 or P2
    • Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Front line workers MF3 & MF1 has Azure AD premium 1 service which should suffice.
  • An Azure AD organization can have maximum of 5000 dynamic groups.
  • Any number of Azure AD resources can be members of a single group.

Dynamic Membership based on Domain for Teams:

To create a Dynamic membership MS team, create a Microsoft 365 group first with Dynamic membership in Azure Active directory. You can create a dynamic group from PowerShell but here I will be using Azure Ad GUI to create the dynamic Microsoft 365 group with rule to add users based on their domain and country. I have added a domain m365pal.me to my Azure AD tenant which I will be using here for this example.

  1. Sign in to Azure AD Admin center with administrator role in the Azure AD organization
  2. Click Groups and then click + New Group
  3. Select the Group type as Microsoft 365. Dynamic membership will also work with Security group but for team it should be Microsoft 365 group.
  4. Enter the Group Name & Group email address
  5. Select the Membership type as Dynamic User
  6. Select the Owner and then
  7. Under Dynamic user members section, click Add dynamic query
  8. In Dynamic membership rules panel, add rule to define membership based on users domain & country
    • First rule for Domain: under Property column select userPrinicipalName, Operator should be Contains and the Value should be the domain name in format “@yourdomain.com”. This rule will add all users with the UPN user@yourdomain.com. Now click + Add expression to add the second rule
    • Second rule for country: under Property column select country, Operator should be  Equals and the value should be the country name.
  1. You can also validate the rules by clicking the link Validate Rules and then by adding users to check if the user satisfies the rule
  2. Click Save. This is how it should look like
  1. Click Create.
  2. After waiting for couple of minutes, check the group membership. Please find below screenshot for the group which has two members satisfying the condition. You can also notice the + Add members link is disabled since the group is dynamic membership and not assigned. To modify the rules, click the link Dynamic membership rules link.
  1. Now we are ready to create the MS Teams, go to https://teams.microsoft.com/ and then click Join or create a team at the left bottom corner and then Click Create a team
  2. Click From a group or team and then click Microsoft 365 group
  3. Now select the group you have created in Azure AD and then click Create.
  1. The team is now created, you can find the team on the list. Check the membership of the team which will have the two users satisfying the rules and the owner of the group. One more thing to notice here is the message which says The membership settings prevents you from adding or removing members.
  1. Voila! Dynamic Microsoft team is now created & setup.

If you have an existing team to be converted to a Dynamic team, find the Microsoft 365 group in Azure AD for the Team you wish to convert and then update the membership status from Assigned to Dynamic user with membership rules

Dynamic Membership based on Domain for Yammer:

Yammer (Microsoft 365 Connected) also supports dynamic membership. Find the steps below to create a dynamic yammer group based on the user’s domain. Find the steps below

  1. Sign in to https://yammer.com/ with your organizational ID
  2. Click Create a Community and then Enter the name of the Community
  3. Click the button Create
  1. Now sign in to Azure AD Admin center to the update the membership settings of the Microsoft 365 group connected to the Yammer community. Find the yammer group and then click
  1. Click Properties under the Manage blade and then change the membership type from Assigned to Dynamic user
  1. After updating the membership type to Dynamic user. You will now have option to enter the dynamic query. Click dynamic query
  1. In Dynamic membership rules panel, add rule to define membership based on users domain
    • Rule for Domain: under Property column select userPrinicipalName, Operator should be Contains and the Value should be the domain name in format “@yourdomain.com”. This rule will add all users with the UPN user@yourdomain.com. Now click + Add expression to add rules based on need
    • Click Save
  1. Click Save. Wait for couple of minutes for the membership to be updated.
  2. Now check the Yammer group in Yammer.com for the membership status. Please find below screenshot for your reference which will not have the + icon on the highlighted members section for adding users since this is now a dynamic yammer group

Also, Microsoft 365 group/Security group can be used for different use cases. See some sample use cases below

  • You can use to target SharePoint page/news to specific audience with the help of Microsoft 365 group or Security group. Will it not be more powerful if you use dynamic groups within a SharePoint to target content certain group of audience!
  • Assign Microsoft Licenses to users based on Dynamic Group.
  • Grant access to an App (PowerApps etc) using the dynamic group targeting certain departments, geographies etc

Reference:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/enterprise-users/groups-create-rule

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/enterprise-users/groups-dynamic-membership

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/dynamic-memberships

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/yammer/manage-yammer-groups/create-a-dynamic-group

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/yammer/manage-yammer-groups/yammer-and-office-365-groups

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/enterprise-users/directory-service-limits-restrictions

Create a Dynamic distribution list based on user’s domain in Exchange online:

Dynamic distribution groups are mail-enabled Active Directory group to distribute email messages to all its members within a Microsoft Exchange organization. Unlike regular distribution lists that contain a defined set of members, the membership list for dynamic distribution groups is calculated each time a message is sent to the group, based on the filters and conditions that you define in the group. You can create a Dynamic Distribution list from Exchange Admin center as shown below but the options to write advanced filter conditions or rules are limited so PowerShell is preferred.

Dynamic Distribution list from PowerShell:

Make sure the Exchange online PowerShell module is installed. There are some limitations to create a recipient filter (Rules) that worked based on user’s domain with the operator like or contains but there is a workaround. The filter works based on the exchange property WindowsEmailAddress which is always the primary SMTP address, you can also consider using the property WindowsLiveID. Follow the steps below to create a Dynamic Distribution list based on user’s domain

  1. Load the module by the running the command Import-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement
  2. Connect to the Exchange online PowerShell in Microsoft 365
Connect-ExchangeOnline -UserPrincipalName userId@domain.com -ShowProgress $true
  1. After authentication, enter the following command to create the Dynamic DL based on User’s domain. I have added the RecipientTypeDetails in the RecipientFilter to apply the filter rule only to user mailboxes which excludes the SharedMailboxes
New-DynamicDistributionGroup -Name "All Users - M365PAL DL" -RecipientFilter "(RecipientTypeDetails -eq 'UserMailbox') -and (WindowsEmailAddress -eq '*@yourdomain.com')"
  1. You can also validate the users using the following script
Get-Recipient -RecipientPreviewFilter (Get-DynamicDistributionGroup "All Users - M365PAL DL").RecipientFilter
  1. To view the attributes to be used in the recipient filter enter the following command
Get-User -Identity user@yourdomain.com | Format-List

Reference:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/recipients/dynamic-distribution-groups/dynamic-distribution-groups

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/get-user

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/recipients/dynamic-distribution-groups/view-dynamic-distribution-group-members

Summary: On this post we have seen how to create dynamic groups based on user’s domain. Do some planning to start using the dynamic groups which will help reduce lot of administrative overhead. Hope you have found this informational & helpful. Let me know any feedback or comments on the comment section below

Trigger an Azure Webjob from Power Automate

On this post let us see how to trigger or run a WebJob from Power Automate. WebJob is a powerful service in Azure keeping in mind the supported file types or programs it can run. Before proceeding with the instructions to call a WebJob in Power Automate, let us see some basics of an Azure WebJob. WebJobs is a feature of Azure App Service that enables you to run a program or script in the same instance of the Azure web app with no additional cost. As of now it is not supported in App service plan for Linux. There are two types of WebJobs

  1. Continuous WebJob
    • Starts immediately when the WebJob is created. To keep the job from ending, the program or script typically does its work inside an endless loop.
    • Runs on all instances that the web app runs on. You can optionally restrict the WebJob to a single instance.
  2. Triggered WebJob
    • Starts only when triggered manually or on a schedule based on CRON expression.
    • Runs on a single instance that Azure selects for load balancing.

Supported file types for scripts or programs:

The following file types are supported:

  • .cmd, .bat, .exe (using Windows cmd)
  • .ps1 (using PowerShell)
  • .sh (using Bash)
  • .php (using PHP)
  • .py (using Python)
  • .js (using Node.js)
  • .jar (using Java)

Check here the documentation from Microsoft to choose between Flow, Logic Apps, Functions & Webjobs for your automation services with comparisons against each other. If you are using a Function app with a Consumption plan your function can run only to a max of 10 mins. If you have a long running task on a webjob, set this property in the App service Application setting from the Configuration blade as shown below

The above setting is to avoid idling out if there is no CPU activity. The IDLE timeout setting is set to 1 hour in the above screenshot.

Azure WebJobs SDK:

There is a Powerful Azure WebJobs SDK which simplifies the task of writing background processing code that runs in WebJobs. It makes it easier to write code that reads or writes from Azure Storage account and it also facilitates to trigger the WebJob if there is any new data on the queue, blob, table, service bus for an event driven architecture. Azure functions is built on the WebJobs SDK. If you set your web app to run continuous or scheduled (timer-trigger) WebJobs, enable the Always on setting on your web app’s Azure Configuration page to ensure that the WebJobs run reliably. This feature is available only in the Basic, Standard, and Premium tiers of the App service plan.

Create and Deploy a WebJob:

To call a WebJob from Power Automate, let us create a Triggered WebJob (.Net Framework) from Visual Studio. There is a also support for .NET Core console apps as WebJobs. Refer this documentation from Microsoft to create a WebJob from Visual Studio. In Visual studio there is a template to create a WebJob project as shown below

This is how the VS project looks like

The Program.cs has the code to ensure that the Job will be running continuously, for this case it is not required comment or remove the code which is highlighted. The Functions.cs has the code to pick up the message from the Storage Queue (Event-Driven) through the WebJobs SDK runtime, the WebApp must set to Always on to make it work. For this example, it is not required since it is going to be a triggered Job so the file Functions.cs can be deleted.

If you have any arguments to be passed from Power Automate, you can access it on your code as shown below

To deploy the WebJob, right click the project and select Publish. If there is no publish profile yet, create one or export it from Azure WebApp and then Publish. To know more about the Publish settings In the Publish tab, choose Edit as shown below

The WebJob will be now in Azure. Go to your Azure WebApp or App Service and click WebJobs under the settings blade to find the WebJob deployed from Visual Studio. Find the WebJob in the Azure portal

WebJobs API endpoint for the WebJob:

There are API endpoints available for the Azure WebJob which will be used for triggering the WebJob from Power Automate. Go through the following documentation for more details on the list of available endpoints:

https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu/wiki/WebJobs-API

To Trigger or Start a WebJob, you should have the Webhook URL from the Azure Portal. To get the URL, click Properties after selecting the WebJob as shown below

Copy the Web hook URL, User Name and Password to be later used in Power Automate. Let us trigger the WebJob from Postman client using the above information

Method: Post

URL: https://yourappname.scm.azurewebsites.net/api/triggeredwebjobs/webjobname/run

Authorization Type: Basic Auth

User Name and Password copied from the Portal

This will trigger the Job.

If there are parameters to be passed, the API would be like

https://youwebappname.scm.azurewebsites.net/api/triggeredwebjobs/youwebjobname/run?arguments={arg1} {arg2}

Trigger from Power Automate:

Till now we have the WebJob published in Azure, can we call an API in Power Automate. Yes, it is possible with the help of the Premium action HTTP as shown below

Voila! The WebJob has been triggered from Power Automate.

Summary: On this post we have seen how to call a WebJob using PowerAutomate. There is also a trigger to calla  Flow from a PowerApp, which could be used to start the WebJob. Hope you have found this informational & helpful. Let me know any feedback or comments on the comment section below

How to setup custom domain and email address in Microsoft 365 online tenant

On this blogpost let us see how to add a custom domain and configure exchange email address for the added domain in a Microsoft 365 tenant. This will allow you to create M365 identities for the users in the Microsoft 365 tenant like user@domain.com instead of user@domain.onmicrosoft.com. This setup is also required if you have a Hybrid setup with users from Onpremise Active directory. Azure AD connect tool helps you synchronize your AD identity from Onpremise to Azure AD or Microsoft 365 tenant directory only if there is a custom domain added to the directory. The custom domain can be added from Microsoft 365 tenant admin center or Azure Active directory portal associated to the M365 tenant.  

Pre-Requisites:

  • Own a Domain from any domain providers
  • Global administrator of Microsoft 365 tenant

If you don’t add a domain, user account in your organization will use the default onmicrosoft.com domain for their email address and UPN. To setup and configure a custom domain, you will have to

  1. Add a TXT or MX record
  2. Add DNS records to connect Microsoft 365 services

For this blog post I have used Domain.com provider to add the DNS records for the custom domain

Add a TXT or MX record:

The first step is to prove you are Owner of the domain and also make the domain is not associated to different tenant. To generate the DNS record values and to add the custom domain login to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center

  1. Select Show all > Settings > Domains
  2. Click Add domain
  3. Enter the custom domain name you own
  4. Click on the button Use this domain

Select Add a TXT record to the domain’s DNS records but you can also add a MX record or add a text file to the domain’s website. Find the different options

  1. The DNS record values for the TXT record will be generated as shown below. TTL 3600 seconds is 1 hour
  1. Add the DNS record for TXT from the domain provider interface for managing the records
  1. Go back to the Admin center and then click Verify. It takes around 15 mins to an hour for the DNS records to propagate, sometimes it may even take more time. Keep trying till the domain in verified. Once the domain is verified you will be able to proceed to the next step for configuring the Microsoft 365 services like exchange etc. You can also Skip and do the configuration later but with this setup you can create user accounts by using the custom domain as its UPN e.x user@domain.com without email address. Find instructions on this link to add a custom domain from Azure Active directory portal.

Add DNS records to connect Microsoft 365 services:

The domain is added & verified, now its time to connect the Microsoft services like Email (Exchange Online, Outlook), Mobile device Management aka MDM with the custom domain. On this post will be connecting only to Exchange online to receive email through Microsoft 365. After this setup is done Exchange online will be your new email host for the domain. After the domain is verified from the step above, select Add your own DNS records and click Continue button as shown below

The following DNS records will be generated as shown below

  • MX Records (Mandatory)
    • Sends incoming mail for your domain to the Exchange Online service in Office 365. Mails are delivered to the mail exchange server with the lowest preference number for this record, typically.
  • CNAME Records (Optional: For Outlook client to work)
    • Helps Outlook clients to easily connect to the Exchange Online service by using the Autodiscover service. Autodiscover automatically finds the correct Exchange Server host and configures Outlook for users
  • TXT Records (Optional: SPF record for prevention of spamming)
    • Helps to prevent other people from using your domain to send spam or other malicious email. Sender policy framework (SPF) records work by identifying the servers that are authorized to send email from your domain

Go back to the domain hosting provider interface to add the above DNS records, to get the values for each record expand each record shown on the above interface.

MX Record:

Set the priority to the Highest or to the number 0 and then add the DNS record. If the domain is xyz.com

Sample value/Content: xyz-com.mail.protection.outlook.com

CNAME Records:

Name: Autodiscover

Value/content: autodiscover.outlook.com

TTL: 1 hour

TXT Records (SPF):

There can be only one SPF record on the DNS records so if there are another record already (default), refer this link for more information. I already had the default one so the valye for the TXT record looked like v=spf1 ip5:XX.XX.XXX.X/XX include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all

ipX:XX.XX.XXX.X/XX is the default one

Now after all the DNS records are added, choose Continue. This will take you to the last page of the wizard with the message Domain setup is complete

Now the setup is completed, you can create users using the new custom domain or change an existing users UPN and email address on Admin center with the following steps

  1. Go to Users > Active users page
  2. Select the user’s name, and then on the Account tab select Manage username.
  3. On the Aliases box, enter the new alias@yourdomain.com and then click Add
  4. Select the new alias and if required change it to the primary email.

Summary: On this post we have seen how to configure a custom domain with email. There can also be multiple domains in one tenant. Hope you have found this informational. Let me know any feedback or comments on the comment section below

Reference:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/get-help-with-domains/create-dns-records-at-any-dns-hosting-provider

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/connect-your-domain-to-office-365-cd74b4fa-6d34-4669-9937-ed178ac84515

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/setup/add-domain

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-a-new-domain-in-microsoft-office-365-285437c3-d6c9-45cd-8b48-ed29c670c796

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/setup/domains-faq?view=o365-worldwide

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/external-domain-name-system-records

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/set-up-spf-in-office-365-to-help-prevent-spoofing?view=o365-worldwide

Create Tile view card for custom List item image attachments using PowerAutomate & JSON row view formatting

In Modern SharePoint lists you can display list item content in a more modern way using the Tiles view layout. If you have very big list with multiple columns along with picture columns you get a horizontal scroll bar on the list view, the Tiles view can solve this issue since the content will be displayed on the tile card where you can design the layout of the tile card to display the different list column values.

There are many blog posts & PnP Samples which will help you to create a Tiles view using JSON row formatting. If you are new to JSON row formatting, I recommend you to go through this link from Microsoft. Microsoft has recently brought in interface to format the list item row & do conditional formatting by creating rules based on column values

On this blog post, lets see how to create Tiles view as shown above for the Images stored as attachments in the list item. If you add an attachment to list item in SharePoint list, the attachments are stored in the following path

https://domain.sharepoint.com/sites/SiteName/Lists/ListName/Attachments/ItemID/attachmentName.extension

Components used in this blog post

  1. Power Automate Flow: To get the path of the attached file (Image file in this case), we will be creating an automated Flow which gets triggered on List item creation to get the path of the image & update it to the custom hyperlink list column (ProductPhotoHL).
  2. JSON: To create a Tile view layout using list row view formatting.

Pre-Requisites:

  • Create a SP List by the name ProductInformation with the following columns
    1. Title: Single line of text
    2. ProductPhotoHL: Hyperlink (to the image)
    3. ProductPhotoPic: Picture (to the image)
    4. ProductPrice: Number
    5. Features: Multiple lines of text
  • Couple of list items with Images as attachments after the Power automate flow is created
    1. Only images as attachments
    2. Not more than one image as an attachment

Power Automate to get the path of the Image attachment URL:

Create an automated flow with Trigger When an item is created and configure the trigger to the ProductInformation list. Add the Get Attachments action connected to the Product Information list & for Id parameter it should the List item Id (ID) selected using the dynamic content from the trigger When an item is created.

Now with the above action we have the attachment URL of the image, this must be updated to the list column ProductPhotoHL & ProductPhotoPic of the ProductInformation list in order to be displayed in the Tile view. To create the above shown Tile view ProductPhotoPic (Picture) is not required but I’ve used it show you that we can create a Thumnail of the image on the default list view using the Picture column ProductPhotoPic. By the time I am writing this post the Power Automate action Update item is not capable to update a column with Picture as a DataType but it can update a HyperLink column. Action Send an HTTP request to SharePoint to make HTTP requests to any SharePoint Rest endpoints, I’ve used this action to update the ProductPhotoPic (Picture) column as below

I’ve said this on the pre-requisite section that there should not be more than one attachment. In the Body of the HTTP request, the Url parameter for the ProductPhotoHL & ProductPhotoPic gets only the first attachment URL from the previous action “Get attachments” AbsoluteUri as dynamic content. To get the first attachment URL you can use any of the following formula from the expression

  • first(body(‘Get_attachments’))?[‘AbsoluteUri’]
  • body(‘Get_attachments’)?[0]?[‘AbsoluteUri’]

I’ve used the function first() to get the first item from the array. The flow is ready, add couple of items to the list by filling in information only for Title, ProductPrice, Features & a Image as an attachment. The flow gets triggered which will update the ProductPhotoHL & ProductPhotoPic with the image attachment url. You can download the flow template from the following GitHub repo link.

Create Tiles View layout using JSON:

I’ve used the sample from PnP List view formatting samples to create items in tile layout for images. On the sample JSON I’ve updated the column ProductPhoto to ProductPhotoHL. The updated JSON is available here for download. Now copy the JSON & go to the List view & click on the down arrow (All Items)>Format current view>Advanced mode as shown below

The Apply formatting to should be set to Entire Row & paste the JSON to box as shown on the picture and then Save it.

Now you will have another layout by the name Tiles added to the existing layouts List & Compact List as shown below, select it

Now its time to see the need for the column ProductPhotoPic of datatype Picture, with the default layout you can see the thumbnail of the image added as an attachment

Summary: There are many samples available in PnP Github repo for List Row View & Column view formatting. In document & picture libraries the Tiles view layout are added by default, there is also a Column by the name Thumbnail in a Picture library. You can display a Thumbnail view of Images in PowerApps gallery for the Images stored in Document library, go through this link for more information. If you are storing images on a seperate document library & not as an attachment, the url of the image can be added on the HyperLink column. Hope you find this interesting & helpful.