I had to build a fairly complex workflow not long ago. The workflow was built in SharePoint Designer 2013 and had a lot of moving parts to it. So many, that when I went to publish it I received the following error message: “Microsoft.Workflow.Client.ActivityValidationException: Workflow XAML failed validation due to the following errors: Activity “SomeXActivity” has 65 arguments, which exceeds the maximum number of arguments per activity (50).” This error message is actually telling us that our workflow has too many variables within it. Basically, this is happening because when the workflow is running the Workflow Manager has to manage more 58 (in my case) variables. Workflow Manager only allows there to be 50 variables in the workflow… by default.
Finally moving on to Microsoft Flow. I really like Flow. It’s a great replacement for the SharePoint Designer Workflow and in my opinion a strong competitor to 3rd party workflows. Don’t get me wrong, those other tools are great and I have used them happily in the past, but so far Microsoft Flow has met all of my recent needs and already covered by the O365 license I have. If I don’t have to spend extra or my client doesn’t either and Flow meets our needs, then to me that is a huge bonus. In today’s post, I am going to illustrate how to create a workflow that does NOT fire when an item is added. This is because, for the requirements of this solution, users will want to be able to save the item without a workflow being initiated. So in other words, I am going to show how to create a Flow to be started manually. This can be done from the list, or in a later post I will show how to do it from the PowerApp form itself.
Posts in this series:
- Preparing SharePoint
- Integrating PowerApps as a Custom List Form
- Customizations All List Form PowerApps Should Have
- Setting a SharePoint People Picker Field Programmatically in PowerApps
- Cascading Drop-down Lists and People Picker in PowerApps
- Create a Flow to be Started Manually
- Creating a Multiple Approver Microsoft Flow
- Sending a Tweet from Microsoft Flow
- Starting a Microsoft Flow from a PowerApp
Welcome to the next part in my series about building a modern solution in SharePoint. This post we are going to cover integrating PowerApps as a custom list form in your solution. When PowerApps was first released, Microsoft made sure that everyone knew it wasn’t built for SharePoint. In fact the first examples that Microsoft provided didn’t even involve SharePoint. Since then SharePoint lists and libraries can be accessed by PowerApp forms using connectors into those environments. Finally, in the final quarter of 2017 Microsoft provided the ability to integrate PowerApps directly into a list form, thus overriding the default forms of a list. So like the InfoPath forms of days gone by, you can now use PowerApps for creating, editing and viewing data in your lists. This post will cover setting up a PowerApp for these list forms. The next post we will customize the form more to meet our needs for this solution.
Posts in this series:
- Preparing SharePoint
- Integrating PowerApps as a Custom List Form (this post)
- Customizations All List Form PowerApps Should Have
- Setting a SharePoint People Picker Field Programmatically in PowerApps
- Cascading Drop-down Lists and People Picker in PowerApps
- Create a Flow to be Started Manually
- Creating a Multiple Approver Microsoft Flow
- Sending a Tweet from Microsoft Flow
- Starting a Microsoft Flow from a PowerApp
Continuing my series on building a modern SharePoint solution using PowerApps and Flow I want to show how to go about setting a SharePoint people picker field programmatically in PowerApps. This goes back to one of the requirements listed for my solution in part 1 of this series: “Requestor’s manager should be auto-populated as an approver”. What’s nice about this is the manager field is filled in already by the company’s administration system. It exists in Azure AD and thus within Office 365, which just so happens to have a connector that easily allows us to build with it. I am getting ahead of myself though. Let’s dig in and learn how to do this.
Posts in this series:
- Preparing SharePoint
- Integrating PowerApps as a Custom List Form
- Customizations All List Form PowerApps Should Have
- Setting a SharePoint People Picker Field Programmatically in PowerApps
- Cascading Drop-down Lists and People Picker in PowerApps
- Create a Flow to be Started Manually
- Creating a Multiple Approver Microsoft Flow
- Sending a Tweet from Microsoft Flow
- Starting a Microsoft Flow from a PowerApp