microsoft azure logic apps monthly update

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – November 2017

Published on : Nov 30, 2017

Category : Microsoft Azure

Sriram Hariharan

Author

It’s a bit longer this time! Exactly two months after the previous Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update from #MSIgnite, the Logic Apps team were back for their webcast on November 29, 2017. As always, the expectations were high to look into the updates that are coming into the Logic Apps portal. There was no Jeff Hollan in this session, so it was up to Jeff Hollan, Kevin Lam and Derek Li from the team to deliver the updates. So, buckle up! Here we take a look at the updates!!!

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

  1. SOAP!! Finally – The most requested and voted feature in UserVoice is now available in Azure Logic Apps. You can use the SOAP functionality over and above the already existing custom connector functionality.
  2. Azure Functions with Swagger – You can automatically render the Azure functions annotated with Swagger. You can have the properties exposed from your Azure Function showing up on the card to make the Azure Function look more richer with the information.
  3. HTTP OAuth with Certificates – OAuth2 is now supported for certificates
  4. Liquid Templates – This feature was released about a month ago. Liquid templates are used in Azure Logic Apps as an XSLT for JSON objects. You can create transformations on JSON objects (ex. JSON to JSON mapping and more other formats) without having to introduce a custom Azure Function. In addition, you can use Liquid templates to create a document/email template with replaceable parameters that you can use to create an output according to your requirement. Liquid templates are part of the Integration Account.
  5. Monitoring View – The team have added some cool functionalities for Azure Logic Apps monitoring such as –
    1. Expression Tracing – You can actually get to see the intermediate values for complex expressions
    2. Decode/render XML with syntax coloring
    3. Do-until loop iterations
    4. For-each failure navigation
  6. Bulk resubmit in OMS
  7. Portal workflow settings page – New page where you can find all the workflow level settings in a single page and you make configuration changes from the single page. This avoids you to go to multiple places just to make specific configuration changes.
  8. New URI expressions – trim, uriHost, uriPathAndQuery, uriPort, uriScheme, uriQuery
  9. New Object Expressions – propertySet, property Add, propertyRemove. These expressions help you to manipulate the object throughout the life of the Logic App.
  10. Configurable parallelism for for-each loops and polling triggers – A toggle button to configure the degree of parallelism in a range of 1–50.
  11. Batching – a new trigger has been added to support the size based release. Furthermore, you can configure all the batches (size based, time based and count based) centrally in the Integration Account.

New Connectors

  • Cognitive Services
    • Content Moderator
    • Custom Vision
    • QnA Maker
  • Azure Kusto
  • Azure Container Instances – Manage containers right from Azure Logic Apps (create, group, manage (run workloads) and delete them)
  • Microsoft Kaizala
  • Marketo
  • Outlook – webhook trigger
  • SQL – dynamic schema for stored procedures
  • Blob – create block blob
  • Workday Human Capital Management (HCM)
  • Pitney Bowes Data Validation
  • D&B Optimizer
  • Docparser
  • iAuditor SafetyCulture
  • Enadoc
  • Derdack Signl4
  • Tago
  • Metatask
  • Teradata – write operations
Derek Li showed a cool demo of how the configurable degree of parallelism works for for-each loops. You can watch the demo from 14:28 in the video.

Logic Apps New Offerings (New Business Model)

The cost of per action calls to Azure Logic Apps has been reduced and clear distinction has been made w.r.t Native calls ($800 per million actions to $25 per million actions)/Standard Connector calls ($800 per million actions to $25 per million actions)/Enterprise Connector calls. Standard Integration Account                    Basic Integration Account 500 schemas & 500 maps                              50 schemas & 50 maps 500 Partners                                                        2 Partners 500 Agreements                                                 1 Agreement $1.35/hour                                                            $0.404/hour – 70% < standard

What’s in Progress?

  1. Complex Conditions within the designer – A Visual Studio Query like builder kind of experience so that they can build conditions as they want and build their applications
  2. Configurable lifetime – Currently the lifetime is set to 90 days. In future, this can be customized anywhere between 7 days and 365 days.
  3. Degrees of parallelism for split-on and request triggers
  4. Tracked properties in designer
  5. Snippets – patterns based approach (templates) to insert into a Logic App
  6. Updated Resource Blade
  7. On Premises Data Gateway
    1. Support for Custom Connectors (including SOAP)
    2. High Availability – create a gateway cluster with automatic failover capability
  8. Custom assemblies in Maps
  9. Support for XSLT 3
  10. New liquid actions – text/json
  11. Connectors
    1. SOAP Passthrough
    2. Office365 Excel
    3. Lithium
    4. Kronos
    5. K2
    6. Zoho
    7. Citrix ShareFile
    8. Netezza
    9. PostgreSQL
Watch the recording of the session here

Community Events Logic Apps team are a part of

  1. Microsoft Tech Summit 2017-18 (happening Worldwide) – Logic Apps & API Management
  2. Gartner Application Strategies and Solutions Summit 2017 – December 4 — 6, 2017 at Las Vegas, NV

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 –