Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – October 2015

Published on : Oct 30, 2015

Category : Microsoft Azure

Sriram Hariharan

Author

Azure Update October 2015 In one of our earlier blog post, we mentioned how Microsoft is taking the effort to shape a community driven approach by organizing a monthly “Google Hangout session” to communicate the latest updates in the filed of Azure Logic Apps. This month’s session – fifth in the series – happened yesterday (October 29th). You can watch the webcast here. The session saw a new face in the Logic Apps team along with Jeff Hollan and Kevin Lam – Jon Fancey, who joined Microsoft very recently.

Community Update

The session kicked off with Jeff talking about the community events that have happened over the last month. The key highlight was that one of our initiatives’ – the “Integration User Group” events a.k.a. “IntegrationMonday” was given a special mention for the number of sessions on Logic Apps over the past month. Kudos to the Integration User Group team for keeping the ball rolling with these community events!

SplitOn Feature

This feature is very useful if you have a trigger that generates a batch output. For example, the SQL Trigger (Microsoft SQL Connector). If you notice, the SQL Trigger will output an array of results (batch result). Say, you have a customer list and the trigger generates the array with the following information – Id, Name, Address, Company, Phone, and so on. If you are using this batch in a logic app and you want to use each item from the batch for further processing (next steps), you can use the “Repeat” function to repeat the items. However, this gets tricky when you are passing the results through multiple steps. There may be situations where you may need to reference the output from one step in another step and it gets very difficult to get your logic working. The easiest solution for this problem is to be able to work individually with each item in the batch. This is where the “splitOn” feature becomes useful during development. What this feature does is that it splits every single item in the batch and puts them separately into the workflow. We’d recommend you to watch the video to see how the SplitOn feature works.

Azure Resource Explorer

This is an alternative to the “Code View” section in the Azure Portal. You can access the Azure Resource Explorer here. This lets you browse the resource definitions of all the resources within the Azure subscription. You can easily edit the code in the Read/Write mode and “Put” it back into the resource group. Tip: You can also see the same view as the Resource Explorer within the Azure Portal under Browse > “Resource Explorer”. It gives a complete read-only view of the resource definitions.

GitHub Connectors

The latest GitHub connectors that have been developed are,
  • Power BI API (to push data into Power BI)
  • MS Health API
  • Machine Learning Batch Execution API

Improvements

Here’s the list of UI improvements –
  • Move button – You can move your logic apps between resource groups and subscriptions
  • Additional references in the Quick Start tile (reference to the Logic App Repository on GitHub)

Language Improvements

Native Binary Data Handling – The logic apps team have added a set of new functions that help to manage binary data inside logic apps. The new functions are –
  • decodeBase64
  • encodeUriComponent
  • decodeUriComponent
  • decodeDataUri
Request debatching – Ability to debatch incoming messages using the “splitOn” feature (discussed above)

What’s Coming Up?

You can expect these new features/functions in the coming months –
  • WebHooks
    • Manual trigger type with schema validation capabilities
    • Static endpoints independent of subscription id and resource group name
    • WebHook Action
    • Manual Action
  • Message Tracking
    • Message correlation across runs
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. You can watch the full video here