Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – November 2016

The Azure Logic Apps team organized their monthly Google Hangout session on November 22, 2016, a week before their Thanksgiving holidays. The key updates from the monthly webcast are as follows –

What’s New?

1. Azure Service Bus has new actions and triggers for the GET operation. You can now get a batch of messages all at once instead of individual Get actions and pass them as function to other objects
2. IP Whitelisting – You can configure specific IP addresses in your Azure portal that should call your trigger
3. Regenerate access keys in the portal
4. Static IPs are now available for Logic Apps
5. Metadata Lookup – You have the ability to edit the partners and agreements in the integration account. There is also a new action that is capable of performing a lookup on the integration account artifact to retrieve the configuration information.
6. B2B tracking in Operation Management Services
7. Singleton Instances – This option is at present made available in the code view only and will be made available in the designer view shortly. By setting the singleton instance on your (polling) trigger, only one instance (of the Logic App) will run at a time. This is also very useful when there are multiple recurring triggers (running at the same time) while the Logic App is actually in execution. The singleton instance will make sure only one recurring trigger runs at a particular time till the Logic App finishes execution.
8. Show Raw Inputs/Outputs in Run history view – The Run History view will now display the raw view of the JSON of the message body. You need not navigate away from the Run History view to the Overview section to view the JSON of the message body.
9. Access request query parameters as tokens
10. Run in designer – You can click “Run” from the designer view
11. New SaaS Connectors
    1. Azure DocumentDB connector
    2. Azure Storage Queues
    3. File System connector
    4. Power BI – You can push data from your Logic App to Power BI
    5. Cognitive Services (text) – sentiment analysis
    6. Face API – Picture / face recognition
    7. HipChat
    8. WordPress
    9. CampFire
    10. Vimeo
    11. Asana
    12. Bitly
    13. JIRA
    14. Pinterest
    15. Google Tasks
    16. Google Calendar
    17. Disqus
    18. Instapaper
    19. Redmine
    20. Easy Redmine

Azure Portal Improvements

1. Access Control Configuration and Access Keys – You can define the IP address ranges for Triggers and Contents for the Logic App. The IP address range for a trigger will mean that you will be able to fire a trigger on the Logic App only when a request comes from the specific IP range. Similarly, you can restrict access to the message content by IP address through the IP ranges for Contents section.
2. Cancel Run – You can quickly cancel a running Logic App workflow
3. Resubmit confirmation message
4. Run in the designer view – You can now run a Logic App without having to close the designer view. You can see the Logic App working in real time and the result appears within the designer view. 

What’s in Progress in Azure Logic Apps?

Let’s take a look at what more is expected from the Azure Logic Apps team in the coming months –

• Improved connector search
• Message batching
• Session state (variables)
• Generate schema from sample – You will have the ability to enter a schema in the request trigger and in the Logic App, you can access the tokens of the message based on the schema
• JSON parse
• Create connection from the Azure subscription – You can easily retrieve the connection string of your Azure resources right from the place you are trying to establish the connection
• Select objects in designer – You can select the entire object as a whole instead of the individual properties of the object
• Partner resolution – Sometimes you may need to know what the partner and agreement resolution is going to be before you try to decode the message. You can figure the resolution out well in advance before you actually decode the message.
• Expression evaluation in Run History – You will see a break down of the evaluation of each workflow definition language functions in the Run History so that you can see what/how it actually evaluated
• Switch – You will be able to build a switch statement within the Logic Apps designer itself
• Header control
• Only allow calls from Logic Apps
• Connectors
  • ARM
  • SAP
  • DocuSign
  • MSN Weather
  • Medium

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!   You can watch the full video here to get a feel of the new features that were discussed during the webcast.

Previous Updates

In case you missed the earlier updates from the Logic Apps team, take a look at our recap blogs here –

• Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – August 2016
• Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – April 2016
• Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – February 2016
• Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – January 2016
• Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – November 2015
• Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – October 2015
• Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – September 2015
• Azure Logic Apps – Monthly Update July 2015