The Microsoft Flow 2019 Conference is well underway, I’ve decided to create an informational blog post to summarise the content of my presentation.
Session Information
Getting started with Microsoft Flow custom connectors
This session is designed to get you started with creating your own custom connectors with Microsoft Flow. You will take a journey through the basic creation, creating connections and handling returned data. During this session we will use the Companies House API as an example of gathering UK based company information.
Visualisations & Information Breakdown
What is an API?
If you think of a menu, it provides a list of dishes you can order, along with a description of each dish. When you specify what menu items you want, it’s passed via the waiter to the restaurant’s kitchen does the work and then the waiter provides you with some finished dishes. You don’t know exactly how the restaurant prepares that food, and you don’t really need to or care, this is very similar to an API it provides you with a list of items you can effectively call and it does some work on the third-parties server, you don’t know what it’s doing, you’re just expecting something back. This has been taken from a previous blog post which can be found here with more information and examples around HTTP Requests.
Custom Connector Workflow
This workflow image shows the area we’re focusing on when creating a custom connector. The custom connector makes a HTTP Request, the third party decides if we’re allowed the information based on our authentication provided, runs some logic to get the response data and then passes that information back to our Flow that it is running in.
Dummy data client: Advanced Rest Client
Creating a Custom Connector Document Guide (Previous Blog Posts)
In this section there are two links to previous blog posts that cover the creation of custom connectors and how to handle the returned data (which was not covered during the flow conference if you want some further reading!) check them out below:
