MS 365 Power Automate Connector

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JohnWhite
Posts: 24
Joined: 01 May 2020, 03:06

The power platform offers significant feature sets for enterprises, of which I suspect most EA subscribers also subscribe too. Having a maintained connector to allow business users to build forms, flows, views/dashboards etc.would extend the usability of the system almost immeasurably.

One can create custom connectors by importing postman collections, openapi definitons etc. but MS doesn't yet support the latest standards (e.g. postman 2.1 like the EA download) only postman v1.

If you could either provide a supported postman v1 collection, or better still build and support an official connector on the MS connector list (would be great advertising for you too!).

Thoughts?
JohnWhite
Posts: 24
Joined: 01 May 2020, 03:06

No takers on this?

A few things have moved on, MS now support v2.1, however, it is restricted to 256 operations. The latest essential API spec has 28x.

Also the essential naming conventions leads to 30 errors in operation names due to special characters, namely ' ( ).

I'll have a go at splitting the postman collection into smaller chunks and create multiple connectors.

A published/certified connector by EA team would be awesome - could you add this to your backlog please?
dkaradia
Posts: 6
Joined: 07 Oct 2021, 13:41

Hi John,

I'm successfully using power automate to call APIS to populate sharepoint lists for things like application catalogue, business capability model &stakeholders and also publishing the viewer (i'm using a variety of core, utility and dataset apis). I'm just using https step to call the APIs so not understanding the benefit of the connector when you can just call via https?

thanks,
Darren
JohnWhite
Posts: 24
Joined: 01 May 2020, 03:06

Hey Darren, thanks for the reply.

I guess having a standard connector that prevents the user from having to worry about authentication, and crafting request/response etc. provides a better user experience.

I have people in my team and outside of my team where they’d be happy to use a standard drag/drop connector for EA but a lot less comfortable manual calling apis.

I’m going to have a go at chopping the swagger up to see if I can import and use without blowing the 256 (?) operation limit.

There are also issues in the definition with unsupported characters (apostrophes) which have to be removed from the operation names before they can be imported.

Having to setup username/passwords (even allowing these once sso has been enabled) feels like a big step back on security too.
dkaradia
Posts: 6
Joined: 07 Oct 2021, 13:41

thanks John,

i've not hit any of these restrictions yet, thanks for the heads up - its good to know.

Darren
JohnWhite
Posts: 24
Joined: 01 May 2020, 03:06

Ok the biggest blocker to creating a custom connector using the postman collection, is that the Power platform doesn't support an Oauth grant type of password.

So we're back to - could EA move to a more modern approach for dealing with api access (remove the need for a user) maybe use app API tokens?
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