The Azure Logic Apps team were back for the monthly update on March 22, 2017. This time the crew had a small change. Derek Li – Program Manager in the Logic Apps team joined Kevin Lam and Jon Fancey to give the updates. Jeff Hollan was behind the scene with a sore throat (wishing him a speedy recovery!). The updates from the webcast are as follows –
What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?
Header Control – In the Logic App designer, you can have Header Control in the HTTP request instead of the raw JSON box.
Generate schema from sample – For the JSON Parse action and request trigger, you need not go to your schema, copy and paste it in the space provided. All you can do is take a sample, put it in the space provided in the designer and watch the schema getting generated. You don’t need to go out of the designer to get your schema.
Add new action from anywhere in the designer – You now can add an action in the middle of your workflow in the designer. This functionality was earlier available in the Code View, but not very explicitly for the users.
Table action – Allows you to convert an array of items into a CVS or HTML table
Connection Resource Picker – you need not leave the Designer view to view Service Bus, DocumentDB, blog and so on
Multipart formdata and formencoded – Let’s assume your Twilio trigger gives the formencoded data. Previously, users were forced to write some custom code to parse the data. However, the trigger now understands the formencoded data and gives you a couple of expressions to parse the data. So, in the Logic App, you can break up the formencoded data and access them as tokens within the Logic App.
Terminate with Succeeded – You can end the Logic App with a “Succeeded” state even if you forcibly terminated the Logic App.
Open Azure Function from Designer – If you are referencing an Azure Function in your Logic App, you can now easily open up the function through a small button in the Logic App designer.
Azure Functions with HTTP Trigger binding (in addition to Webhooks)
Variables – You can now include variables in the Logic App. In the first version, you can initialize, increment, and reference (@variable) the variables in the Logic App.
You can have multiple actions in DoUntil loop
Nested foreach – You can have a nested foreach (one foreach inside another). This functionality was earlier restricted in the Logic App.
Foreach supports 100K items; an increase from 5K items
Version promotion – Every save of your Logic App saves it as a new version, and you can take a look at the old version information, and as well promote one of the older version to be your active version (roll back).
Date-time filter for runs – You can filter a run based on the date-time in the Management Portal. This filter comes in addition to the Status filter.
Open Nested Logic App – On the monitoring view, when you click the child Logic App, you can see the monitoring view of the child Logic App directly.
Partner tile in OMS
NEW REGION: Canada – Kent Weare should be happy reading this 🙂
New SaaS Connectors – The team has been pretty busy in rolling out the SaaS based connectors and the list is quite long for this edition of Logic Apps Live webcast. There are over 120 connectors in Logic Apps and the list is definitely growing. Let’s get through the list of newly added connectors quickly –
Azure Data Lake – You can push your data into Azure Data Lake and generate more data interaction scenarios for Logic Apps
Azure Automation – You can easily call your Runbooks from your Logic App. Perfectly suitable for the Dev Ops scenario
Azure Event Hub – This connector has both the trigger and the action for the Event Hub so that you can start pumping events to your Event Hub
Oracle DB
Zendesk
Eventbrite
Pipedrive
Infusionsoft
Basecamp 2
Intercom
FreshBooks
Leankit
WebMerge
Pivotal Tracker
Toodledoo
Muhimbi PDF
New Operations on Connectors
Azure blob – Trigger
FTP metadata only trigger
SQL stored procs on-prem
Cognitive Vision APIs (using the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Connector)
Derek Li showed a cool demo of the newly upcoming cognitive vision APIs where you can use the OCR capability to understand the characters and text within an image. The Logic App will look as shown below –
We recommend you watch the Logic Apps webcast video to get a feel of this cool upcoming feature.
What’s In Progress?
The first set of variable operations are now available (initialize, increment, and reference). In the future, you can set, decrement, append array on the variables
Parallel designer support – This will be made as a first class designer experience as currently its only available in the code view!
Function parameters – You will get a great visual experience in the designer (Swagger view!)
Select, Join operations
Retry Monitoring – Currently, it’s only in the backend and you really don’t get to see what’s happening! The retry will now be exposed and you get to see all the retries, the result, and why they took a longer time to execute
Expression tracing – You can get to see an expression tree for more complex expressions so that you can get to see the values of each expression in each step
Export Logic App in Visual Studio – You can browse your Logic App, export it and open it in your local resource project
Upcoming connectors
Service Bus sessions
Azure Cognitive Vision
SQL Trigger
Oracle EBS
ProsperWorks
Benchmark Email
Inoreader
Phew! That’s quite an update from the team on what’s been released over the last month. And that’s not it – there’s more interesting features coming up shortly!
Community Content – Global Integration Bootcamp
Towards the end of the session, Jeff Hollan made a mention about the upcoming Global Integration Bootcamp event that will be held on March 25th globally.
Update: You can read the blog posts about the success of Global Integration Bootcamp event here, and the recap of the event that we organized in India.
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 –
We recommend you watch the Logic Apps webcast video to get a feel of this cool upcoming feature.
You can watch the full video here to get a feel of the new features that were discussed during the webcast.
