microsoft azure logic apps monthly update

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – July 2017

Published on : Jul 27, 2017

Category : Microsoft Azure

Sriram Hariharan

Author

After the previous Logic Apps live webcast back in May 2017, the team were back just in time for their webcast on July 26, 2017 – a day before Logic Apps went Generally Available (GA) one year ago! Yes, Azure Logic Apps officially turns 1!! A huge round of applause and shout out to the team at Microsoft for giving a great product offering. This episode of Logic Apps live webcast had Jeff Hollan, Kevin Lam and Jon Fancey giving the recent updates that have rolled into the product.
You can download the entire article as a PDF document.
Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – July 2017
Happy Birthday Logic Apps! You’ve turned 1 and have a long way to go!

New York Hackathon – September 5, 2017

The Logic Apps team is conducting a very unique, first of its kind Hackathon event on September 5, 2017 at Microsoft Times Square office in Downtown, Washington. This hackathon will focus on Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Azure App Services, API Management and more. If you are interested to attend this hackathon, send the Logic Apps team a Tweet (DM), email.

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

  1. Export Logic App in Visual Studio – When you open a Logic App from Cloud Explorer in Visual Studio, you can export the Logic App to your Visual Studio project. This will create a file on your file system of the Logic App as an ARM template. You can import this template into the Visual Studio and start using your Logic App within Visual Studio.
  2. Webhooks in Foreach loop – Previously, it was possible to have Webhooks across the Logic App and now the functionality has been extended to the Foreach loop. You can have as many Webhooks in your foreach loop.
  3. Service Principal Authentication (Azure Data Lake and ARM) – If you are using any resource templates, one of the biggest challenges with some OAuth connectors is that you have to give your consent by signing up and giving Logic Apps the permission to access your connection details. This is a challenge when there are numerous deployments. Instead, now when you try to connect to Azure Resource Manager or Azure Data Lake, you can now connect using the Azure Application Service Principal. All you have to do is provide a secret key that has access to the application. Soon, this functionality will roll out to Office365 connectors, Dynamics connectors and SharePoint connectors.
  4. Array handling in designer – Let’s say you have a situation where you have an output from one of the Logic App steps and you want to input the actual array object instead of the actual elements, this operation is now possible in the Logic Apps designer. This is best implemented now in the “Send Email” step where you can add multiple attachments as an array.
  5. Batch Processing – Jon Fancey demonstrated this functionality at INTEGRATE 2017 where users can group things together (arbitrarily).
  6. Variable decrement – In addition to initialize and increment (discussed in the earlier Logic Apps Live webcast), and the Set functionality explained here, the Logic Apps team have added the “decrement” capability to variables. The team will be adding support for more variable types in the coming weeks/months.
  7. Run history compressed view – When you click the Run History section, you will see a compressed view of the actual run history that lists the failed runs for you to easily act upon.
  8. Run API time-range filter – You can now filter the runs based on the time-range (say, between two date range times)
  9. Action Configuration settings (splitOn, retry policy, timeout, sequential flag, disable async polling) – All these operations (that are configurable) can now be performed right from the Logic Apps Designer in the Trigger Configuration settings.
  10. Pan and zoom within the Designer
  11. Server side paging (eg., SQL) – For instance, SQL has a page size limit of 256 rows in a request. Say, when you query more than 256 rows, only the first 256 rows would be fetched from the database. Now you can enable Server Side Paging from the Designer where there is a configurable value and you can retrieve the number of rows depending on the value that is configured.
  12. Expression Authoring – You can build your expression functions from the designer, and all other expressions are listed right in the Designer. It becomes easy for you to find the expressions.
  13. Smart tips – There are hints now available in the Logic Apps Designer that will remind you to perform a very important action.
  14. XSLT Byte Order Mark config – When you use the Transform action, you will normally get back the XML and along with it, you will receive the byte order mark. The Logic Apps team has now in fact cleaned the code in such a way that you can now opt out from receiving those byte order mark in addition to the XML.
  15. Open Sourced Templates – You can submit New / update the existing Templates at github.com/azure/logicapps. The Logic Apps team will review the templates and publish them accordingly.
You can download the entire article as a PDF document.
Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – July 2017

New Connectors

  • Azure File Storage – You can now access your blob attached storage from/to your VM
  • ARM Invoke and Service Principal – The ARM Invoke is super powerful. For any Azure Resource that you have access to, you can easily Start/Stop the VM, etc.
  • Azure Application Insights – This connector allows you to queue up reports and run queries to get the App Insights report
  • Video Indexer
  • Microsoft Planner
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Microsoft Forms
  • Bing Maps
  • Bing Search
  • Adobe Creative Cloud
  • Parserr
  • Calendly
  • Teamwork
  • JotForm
  • Freshservice
  • Pitney Bowes
  • AWeber
  • Cognito Forms
  • Team Work
  • PostreSQL

What’s in Progress?

  1. Large Files – Ability to move large files up to 1 GB (between) for specific connectors (blob, FTP)
  2. SOAP – One of the most requested features on UserVoice. Once available, you will be able to consume SOAP services (both cloud and on-premise)
  3. Expression Intellisense – Logic Apps workflow definitions will incorporate the same code used by Microsoft Visual Studio
  4. Expression tracing – With this capability, you can actually get to see the intermediate values for complex expressions
  5. Foreach nesting in the designer – This was a backend capability that was recently released but this capability will soon be incorporated into the designer.
  6. Foreach failure navigation – Say, you have about 1000 iterations in the foreach loop and 5 of them actually failed, you have to look for which one actually failed. Instead, you can navigate to the next failed action inside a for each loop easily to see what happened.
  7. Functions + Swagger
  8. Logic Apps OMS Package – You can monitor all the Logic Apps using a B2B solution within the Operations Management Suite (OMS). The preview of this OMS dashboard will be available within the next month (before next Logic Apps live webcast). You can bulk resubmit at the same time.
  9. Variables append (capability)
  10. Publish Logic Apps to PowerApps and Flow in a easy way
  11. Export Flow to Logic App ARM template
  12. Code view peek in the Action
  13. Time based batching
  14. Upcoming Connectors
    1. Azure Tables
    2. Azure SQL Data Warehouse
    3. Service Now
    4. Workday
    5. Feedly
    6. MySQL (RW)
    7. Amazon Redshift
You can watch the recording of this session here

Community Events Logic Apps team are a part of

  1. Integration Bootcamp on September 21-22, 2017 at Charlotte, North Carolina. This event will focus on BizTalk, Azure Logic Apps, Azure API Management and lots more.
  2. INTEGRATE 2017 USA – October 25 – 27, 2017 at Redmond. Register for the event today.

Why attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event?

Jim Harrer (Pro Integration Team Program Manager, Microsoft) and Saravana Kumar (Founder/CTO – BizTalk360) give you a heads up as to why you have to attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event.

Feedback

If you are working on Logic Apps and have something interesting, feel free to share them with the Azure Logic Apps team via email or you can tweet to them at @logicappsio. You can also vote for features that you feel are important and that you’d like to see in logic apps here. The Logic Apps team are currently running a survey to know how the product/features are useful for you as a user. The team would like to understand your experiences with the product. You can take the survey here. If you ever wanted to get in touch with the Azure Logic Apps team, here’s how you do it! Reach Out Azure Logic Apps Team

Previous Updates

In case you missed the earlier updates from the Logic Apps team, take a look at our recap blogs here –
You can download the entire article as a PDF document.
Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – July 2017