The ask, suggest some structural changes for a few Power Automate cloud flows to improve readability. The flow makers are already adding comments and notes to their controls, but their flows still come across as unstructured. The proposed solution, add and nest flow actions into Scope controls: Figure 1 - Power Automate cloud flow with … Continue reading Power Automate: Cloud Flow + Better Readability (Scope Controls)
Best Practices
Power Automate: Cloud Flow | Filter Datasets Better
The ask, improve a long running cloud flow's performance. It has a Get files (properties only) action querying 2,000 recent items which are filtered using a Condition block. Because the library already has 100K+ items, OData filters can be hit or miss, so the maker is iterating each returned item, causing the flow loop to … Continue reading Power Automate: Cloud Flow | Filter Datasets Better
Power Automate: Cloud Flow Gotchas | Infinite Loops
The ask, figure out why a maker's cloud flow is running more than expected. Their flow was only recently enabled for PROD, but they reported receiving an email (Figure 1) that their flow was "performing slow" shortly afterwards. Shortly after that, they received a second email (Figure 2) that their flow was "running too many … Continue reading Power Automate: Cloud Flow Gotchas | Infinite Loops
Power Apps: Canvas App | Merging Data Sources w/ AddColumn()
Scenario: There is a canvas app with a text box, two radio choices, a vertical gallery, and two data sources. Toggling the radio button changes which data source is filtered and used to populate the gallery. Problem: The data sources don't have any data columns in common and Power Apps doesn't like that. Solution: Create … Continue reading Power Apps: Canvas App | Merging Data Sources w/ AddColumn()
Programming Concepts: Conditional Logic | If-Then vs Switch
High-code isn't the friendliest to new developers. Still, there are some high-code concepts that even low-code and no-code developers should be aware of. One such concept is conditional logic. Generalizing the idea, conditional logic helps the code determine its next steps based on data input. Conditional logic is universal enough that it's also leveraged in … Continue reading Programming Concepts: Conditional Logic | If-Then vs Switch
Data Security: Longer Passwords | Why?
The short answer, longer passwords are more un-hackable, so they better protect our data. Unfortunately, short passwords are easier to hack. Today's hackers have plenty of fancy hacking tools, so password complexity often turns hacking into a numbers game. Nowadays, password length matters just as much as, if not more than, the characters used to … Continue reading Data Security: Longer Passwords | Why?
Power Automate: Cloud Flow | Best Practices + Tips
Power Automate is the process automation service of the Power Platform. Makers leveraging the solution can build both desktop and cloud flows, but each comes with their own considerations. Though, more people are likely building cloud flows than desktop flows. And for those cloud flow makers, there are some best practices, tips, and factors to … Continue reading Power Automate: Cloud Flow | Best Practices + Tips
Power Platform: Understanding | Solutions + Environments
Application lifecycle management is the governance, deployment, and maintenance of applications. Even though the Power Platform is "low-code", makers should still adopt the practice. More specifically, when deploying their projects as solutions across environments. So, what are solutions and what are environments? Solutions are bundled project assets. In the Power Platform ecosystem, these project assets … Continue reading Power Platform: Understanding | Solutions + Environments
Power Apps: Canvas App | Best Practices + Tips
Power Apps come in two flavors. To begin, there are model-driven apps, which are built on the Microsoft Dataverse and are more data-focused. These model-driven apps are not meant to be pretty. However, canvas apps are customizable and can be pretty, so they're more UI/UX-focused. Contrasting the two approaches, makers should build canvas apps if … Continue reading Power Apps: Canvas App | Best Practices + Tips
Power Apps: Canvas App Styles | Inline vs Internal vs External
Power App canvas apps are easily personalized, but at the moment, not as easily styled as websites. Web developers can share and reuse their stylesheets across projects. Canvas apps, not so much. Even so, there are some similarities with styling scopes. There are three approaches to personalizing and branding canvas apps... Approach #1: Inline Every … Continue reading Power Apps: Canvas App Styles | Inline vs Internal vs External
Power Automate: Lookup Table Arrays
As Power Automate cloud flows grow in complexity, makers often need to nest loops within loops. Nesting loops isn't bad, but nesting the same loop more than once is inefficient. An alternative approach, loop the content once without nesting it and build an array of objects, which creates a lookup table that can be referenced … Continue reading Power Automate: Lookup Table Arrays
Metadata: What + Why
Metadata isn't a new thing. As with plenty of other concepts, people are already using it in some capacity, but likely without realizing it. Most notably though, metadata is heavily used by libraries, eCommerce sites, social media, and streaming platforms. Depending on the scenario, people may use metadata interchangeably with words like attribute, property, tag, … Continue reading Metadata: What + Why
MS Lists: Customize w/ JSON
Cost-conscious businesses typically have narrow profit margins. And because of that, they're likely hesitant to purchase too many third-party app licenses for their employees. Luckily though, if their employees are already licensed for Microsoft 365, then a handful of tech-savvy business users could build many of these apps in-house using Microsoft Lists. As the name … Continue reading MS Lists: Customize w/ JSON
Graph API: Chunky Data + Recursion
Some results are best achieved via recursion, functions being able to "call themselves from within their own code." Using the Microsoft Graph API, recursion is necessary when querying large datasets because the API responses can only return so many records at a time. Whenever there are still more records to query, the response object includes … Continue reading Graph API: Chunky Data + Recursion
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