Flow-tastic Bookmarker using Chrome Extension and Microsoft Flow

April 30, 2019April 30, 2019 / 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)

January 7, 2019 / 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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Look back at incredible 2018 #PowerApps & #Flow posts and influencers

January 5, 2019January 6, 2019 / Geetha Sivasailam / 1 Comment

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! What a year it’s been – full of successes, changes and everything in between. There have been so many amazing community
influencers and incredible posts in the Microsoft Power Platform space in 2018. And 2019 promises to get even better with more community mentors, leaders and super cool content!

I’ve learnt so much from this community and I’m incredibly thankful for that. You guys and gals are amazing!!

Here’s a quick list of some of my fave reads and influencers that inspired my learning experience by month and made 2018 one of the best years. Even though posts are listed by month in the order I got to learn from them, each of those influencers have continued to contribute jaw-droppingly amazing stuff throughout the year. This is also a comprehensive list of people you’d want to follow to be in the know on the latest & greatest in this space.