It took me a little more time than I was expecting, but here it is! The post you are now reading is the last part of the 4-parts series of posts dedicated to Microsoft Adaptive Cards. Information in this post is valid for the September 2019. Because this technology is continuously changing, the knowledge from this post may in some parts get outdated, however I will do my best to update it accordingly.
This post is related to a screencast I’ve made recently. It describes how the Flow, used by the solution, is built in details. Have fun watching and learning how it is made. This post is also part of the sequel I am writing about “Adaptive Cards“.
Sometimes when we are working with PowerApps, adding new connections like to Microsoft Flow or external services and then we decide we don’t need some of them anymore and therefore we are removing it, but forgetting to first delete it in PowerApps, we are finding ourselves in situation, where when trying to export the app as a package, we are facing a very hard to debug issue.
In the first part of the series I wrote a general overview of Message and Adaptive Cards, their brief history and purpose. This part is focused only on Message Cards – the technology from which it all begun and that is still available to use although recommendation is to move to Adaptive Cards.
Some time ago a customer asked me about a more effective user experience when approving tasks in workflows. The reason was that a manager, who was always involved at some time, was on the position, that if he is just sent an e-mail with approval request, this e-mail is going to simply get lost in his inbox and therefore he wouldn’t be able to respond. On the other hand he is using Microsoft Teams often, so asked if he can be notified about a task approval via that app.
When preparing for a new project, I started to check whether different customer expectations are feasible with PowerApps. The first of these is the ability to use an XML file as input, to build a table in the application and possibly to save them to SQL later.
Recently my customer asked me to create a dashboard, to monitor completion of tasks in a workflow. The idea was to highlight completed, on track and overdue tasks with different colors. First I thought about using SharePoint list with Modern Experience, and column formatting. But then I was asked, not only to highlight rows for tasks, but also their grouping header – as there were many tasks created per each group of tasks and the customer wanted to see status of a whole group ad-hoc, without a need to drill down.
It has already been announced couple of months ago, during the Nintex InspireX conference in New Orleans, in February this year, by Vadim Tabakam and Brad Orluk during their presentation “Extensibility on the Nintex Workflow Platform” and later on Nintex Blog.
The new, cool feature (that now is in beta preview), called “extensibility framework”. The tool that is allowing customers to add to the Nintex Workflow Cloud a custom REST API endpoints, that are “encapsulated” into ready-to-use actions. How does it work?