Flow

Flow-tastic Bookmarker using Chrome Extension and Microsoft Flow

/ Geetha Sivasailam / 4 Comments

Social media is brimming with several great blogs, videos, documentation and information that I want to keep up on. And there isn’t enough time in a day to watch or read all the awesome content. Often I come across great posts on my social media feeds or search results based on a problem I’m trying to solve and end up creating bookmarks or leaving several tabs open for reading later. I hardly get to all those tabs/bookmarks and eventually lose track of what I was looking for in the first place.

It got me thinking on how I can efficiently manage bookmarks with just a browser click and incorporate the brilliance of Microsoft Flow to tie in multitude of supported services. Ideally, I’d like to have a placeholder for such content and take notes while reviewing them for future reference, knowledge sharing and follow up actions. I started building a simple Chrome Extension to capture the Title and URL of a webpage and use Flow to create a OneNote section with the captured details.

Chrome Extension

Chrome Extension is just a group of files that are triggered based on browser events and run behind the scenes to enhance your Chrome browsing experience. Building a Chrome Extension is as cool as it sounds. It may seem complicated at first view but it really is relatively easy to develop. You don’t need to be an expert dev and having a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JS can get you started on extensions in no time.

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Flow Tip: Use Condition or Scope control to skip or debug Flow action(s)

/ Geetha Sivasailam / 2 Comments

As part of the Flow design process, I often end up building in some debug actions like Send email, Set variable etc. to capture/troubleshoot values that in turn help along with the actual design. But I’d want to retain those actions for debugging later rather than recreate them. Also when building/designing complex Flows I need to find failing actions and test or disable subset of actions.

Issue

Ideally, you want to be able to deactivate or skip a specific action or set of actions. Microsoft Flow does not have this feature available at this point of time. This requires you to either create a copy of the flow for testing purposes or debug by deleting actions only to realize later that those actions you just deleted weren’t causing the issue. This means you’ll need to re-configure those actions from scratch to restore your Flow design which can be time consuming.

Resolution

Below are two approaches I’ve used and found useful for disabling/skipping actions for testing and debugging purposes.

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Role Based Security In PowerApps using SharePoint Groups

/ Geetha Sivasailam / 33 Comments

Recently a customer asked if PowerApps can support role based security controlled by SharePoint Security Groups. For example, can you make an Admin screen that is visible only to users who belong to a specific SharePoint Security Group? Yes, you can and this is where Microsoft Flow comes to the rescue!

This blog post is an attempt to share an approach for finding out the SharePoint Group membership of a signed in user and make certain features or screens of an app available to them.

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