microsoft azure logic apps monthly update

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – May 2017

Published on : May 4, 2017

Category : Microsoft Azure

Sriram Hariharan

Author

The Azure Logic Apps team have been consistently delivering the monthly update webinars to showcase the improvements in the Azure portal. A huge shout out to the team for maintaining this consistency and at the same time delivering the improvements to the portal. The portal is definitely looking mature and with more features to come in, it’s pretty sure good times are ahead! The webcast for the month of April was held on May 2, 2017. This month’s webcast was spearheaded by Jeff Hollan, Kevin Lam and Jon Fancey from the Azure Logic Apps team. The updates from this edition of Logic Apps live are as follows .
You can download the entire article as a PDF document.
Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – May 2017

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

  1. Visual Studio 2017 tools – Visual Studio 2017 now supports Azure Logic Apps Designer support and tooling. You can go ahead and use Visual Studio 2017 for building Logic Apps and integration related activities.
    1. Download from Cloud Explorer – Visual Studio 2017 now supports Cloud Explorer so that you can look at your live Logic Apps, run history directly from Visual Studio. Even if you’ve got Visual 2015/2017, this is one feature you got to know. In Cloud Explorer, if you find one of your Logic Apps that you built in the portal, you will also notice a small Download button (in Visual Studio). When you click this button, you will get a complete template version of the Logic App that you can use in your resource group project. Any Logic App that you create in the portal can be downloaded as a template from Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2017 Cloud Explorer
  2. Parallel creation in the designer – You can now add a parallel action right from the designer.  You no longer need to go to the code view to perform this operation. Parallel branch Logic Apps Designer
  3. Select and Join actions – You now have more actions that you can perform on arrays. Let’s say you have an array of objects with properties A, B, C. You can select A & B and get a new array of objects with A & B. Similarly, for the Join action lets you take an array of objects and then using the delimiter, you can do a join and create a string out of the entries in the array.
  4. Retry information in history – The Logic Apps designer will expose what actually happened in the background during a run, the number of retries that happened during the time, the number of intermediate calls.
  5. Service Bus Sessions – You can do correlation, sequential convoys from within Logic Apps. Check out this interesting blog post published on “In-order delivery of correlated messages in Logic Apps by using Service Bus sessions“.
  6. Run navigator when looking at history – When you click on an entry in the Runs history, you will see a Run Navigator pane on the right that will be very similar to the Logic App designer view. You need not switch back between multiple screens to know the status of each run history. Run navigator
  7. B2B Disaster Recovery & B2B OMS Message Download – You can implement your own DR policies and replicate the state from one region to another. This is currently available for the AS2 and X12. Support for EDIFACT will be rolled out in the coming weeks. You can watch the short demo of these two functionalities shown by Jon Fancey in this video.
  8. x-ms-dynamic support (values & schema) – For your custom APIs, you can now have dynamic values.
  9. Variables – Set – In addition to initialize and increment (discussed in the earlier Logic Apps Live webcast), you can set a variable with any value and use that variable anywhere in your Logic App
  10. Release Notes on Blade
  11. RunAfter configuration in Designer – basically to determine when the action will run. You can have a RunAfter “success” branch and a RunAfter “failure” branch.
This edition of Logic Apps Live had some cool demos on the B2B Disaster Recovery and B2B OMS Message Download. Kevin showed an interesting demo on the “Sequential Convoy” functionality and finally Jon Fancey showed an interesting upcoming feature in the Logic Apps designer (for Service Bus Queues, Topics, and Event Hub triggers). Watch them all here in the video.
You can download the entire article as a PDF document.
Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – May 2017

New Connectors

  • Azure Active Directory
  • Computer Vision API
  • Outlook Customer Manager
  • Nexmo
  • Paylocity
  • Benchmark Email
  • SQL Trigger (still in Preview)

What’s In Progress?

  1. Expression Tracing – Say, you have a condition and you want to know why the condition traversed to left (yes) or right (no). The monitoring view will now give you a full breakdown tree view of the expression and their values so that you will understand why the logic took the expected path.
  2. For-each nesting in Designer – You can have nested for-each in the code view. This functionality will be extended to the designer so that you can have a for-each within another for-each loop.
  3. Webhooks in for-each
  4. Navigate to for-each failures – The monitoring view will allow you to navigate directly into the next failed iteration instead of scrolling through the entire Logic App definition.
  5. Service Principal Authentication – Say, you have a deployment template/ARM connector or data lake that is Azure Active Directory based, instead of having to associate with user profile during sign-in, you can simply share your app id and app secret and request the system for a valid token.
  6. Array improvements in the designer
  7. Upcoming Connectors
    1. Azure Files
    2. Oracle EBS
    3. Schema support for Service Bus/Event Hub triggers
    4. ARM Invoke and Service Principal
    5. Planner
    6. Team Work
    7. PostgressSQL
    8. MQSeries Server Connections

Community Events the Logic Apps team are a part of

The Logic Apps team will be available at the following events:
  • BUILD 2017 (May 10 – 12, 2017). There is also a serverless pre-day on May 9th where there will be sessions on Azure Logic Apps and Functions and some cool Hands-On Labs and Hackathon. If you are attending BUILD 2017 or Inspire [WPC], get a chance to meet the Logic Apps team.
  • INTEGRATE 2017 (June 26-28, 2017) – Seats are already getting filled up for this premier integration focused event. If you haven’t registered for this event yet, hurry up.Register
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 – May 2017