Azure Functions with Office 365 SharePoint Calls - Creating, Debugging & Deploying NodeJS Functions using Visual Code - Part I

Let us have a detailed look at creating azure functions using visual code, creating sharepoint context for getting site data, debugging locally using visual code, and deploying the code to Azure function app from visual code.

Creating Azure Function using Visual Code:

Setup and install the prerequisites for developing azure functions using visual code.

• Install the visual code on your machine and install all prerequisites required for developing azure functions.
• Install the latest of NodeJS.
• Then install the core tools package required for working with Azure functions. 

npm install -g azure-functions-core-tools

The extensions being enabled on the visual studio can be found in the following snapshot.

Hands-on session on Microsoft Flow

C# Corner Bengaluru Chapter Meet! Hands-on session on #MicrosoftFlow with Vijai Anand

Hands-on Microsoft Flow from Nakkeeran Natarajan

Using Azure Functions, Cognitive Services and Flow for classifying Office 365 SharePoint Word Documents - Part II

Let us look how to integrate Azure Function, Cognitive services into Microsoft Flow for extracting tags/categories and update the SharePoint document item.

This article series helps us to work on a special use case of extracting information of word documents uploaded to Office 365 SharePoint libraries and then analyze/classify the document content using Azure Cognitive Services. Then update the document with classified data as tags/categories. The article links are shown below.

• Using Azure Functions, Cognitive Services and Flow for classifying Office 365 SharePoint Word Documents - Part I (Previous Article) - Azure function is briefly explained with code to understand how the data is being extracted using open XML formats/references available.
• Using Azure Functions, Cognitive Services and Flow for classifying Office 365 SharePoint Word Documents - Part II (Current Article)

Extract Code From Github

The Azure function created in the previous article is available on Github repository (https://github.com/nakkeerann/analyze-sp-word-documents).

• Clone the code from the github repository to the local. 
• Open in visual studio and make necessary changes, like updating user credentials and SharePoint site and details.

Using Azure Functions, Cognitive Services and Flow for classifying Office 365 SharePoint Word Documents - Part I

This article series helps us to work on a special use case of extracting information of word documents uploaded to Office 365 SharePoint libraries and then analyze the document content using Azure Cognitive Services.

We have seen before extracting tags and metadata properties of image files from Office 365 SharePoint using Microsoft Flow and Azure Cognitive Services.

Microsoft Flow has a Get File content action, but that doesn't help extracting word documents content. Only it supports extracting content of notepad as straight forward approach. Since Microsoft Flow doesnt provide any option to read the word documents content, we will be using Azure Functions to extract the content. Once we have the content, we will use Azure Cognitive service to get the tags for the content extracted. Here Microsoft Flow is used to manipulate triggers and subsequent actions. So our algorithm is will be as follows.

High level architecture for classifying SharePoint Word Documents

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.