Connecting Office 365 SharePoint with CDS using Microsoft Flow

How many of you have heard about CDM and CDS? These two components are availabe on Microsoft platform. CDM stands for Common Data Model and CDS is Common Data Service.

CDM is a secured database stored on Microsoft Azure, which contains business standard entities. Those entities can be used by users for various purposes including integrations. This is commonly used for integrating two Microsoft Systems, with the help of templates/entities.

CDS is a basically a service, that utilizes common data model to enable cross platform reporting capabilities. It is most commonly used on Power BIs for report generations.

Scenario

Think of a scenario, where some application uses common data service for storing the data. And some application uses Office 365 SharePoint as the storage point. And both of these applications deals with the same data sets. In this case, both of these storage system needs to be synchronized.

The solution which we are looking at may not be a full end to end solution, but let’s see how we can push data from SharePoint to CDS. There might be many ways, but here let’s look how it can be done easily using Microsoft Flow with just configurations.

Error Handling for Office 365 SharePoint Actions on Microsoft Flow

In this post, let us look how we are going to handle the Office 365 SharePoint action errors that occurs on Microsoft Flow platform.

Problem Statement: There is an option to get the user profile property on Microsoft Flow using SharePoint REST API. We need to handle if there is any error to this action. Let us see how to handle/catch the error and send a mail with error details.

Sometime back I have published an article for updating user display names for items created on SharePoint using Microsoft Flow. We will use the same concept here, but only we will see how to catch and send the error details over mail.

The flow to get and update the user profile property is as follows.

• Create a trigger to fire the flow whenever an item is created.
• Create a SharePoint action “Send an HTTP request to SharePoint”, to get the user profile property details as explained in the article mentioned above.
• Parse JSON data to get the exact required property (user display name).
• Update the same item with author name field with the value retrieved.

Handling Error:

The following steps shows how to configure the flow to handle the error and configuring appropriate send email action.

• Just after the “Send an HTTP request to SharePoint” action, add a parallel branch with an action. 

SharePoint Saturday Bangalore Event - Automating SharePoint Processes with Microsoft Flow

SharePoint Saturday Bangalore 2018 is a free and open SharePoint community event to exchange the knowledge and build fellowship.

Developer Track Session at a SharePoint Saturday Bangalore 2018 Event - Automating SharePoint Processes with Microsoft Flow! It was an extended interactive session where the benefits of using MS Flow for SharePoint explained with live demos.

I spoke on Automating SharePoint Processes with Microsoft Flow in a short session. The session was a developer track session, which had lot of tips, and demos. The agenda included,

• Introduction to Flow
• Templates and Connectors Available
• How to create custom connectors
• How to create and integrate flows with SharePoint or other systems
• Data Loss Prevention Policies
• Benefits & Conclusion

Microsoft Flow is a cloud based tool that helps building automated workflows between multiple systems. In the session, I will be explaining the basic understanding on MS FLOW. Further, I will focus more creating the custom connectors, and let us also look at creating flows with the help of custom connectors.

https://www.slideshare.net/NakkeeranNatarajan/automating-sharepoint-processes-with-microsoft-flow-spsbangalore