The Love-Hate Relationship with Power Automate Flow: A Developer’s Tale.
In recent years, I’ve had the pleasure (and occasional misfortune) of working extensively with Power Automate Flow. If you’re a developer who’s ventured into the world of Microsoft’s automation platform, you probably know exactly what I mean.
Why do I say both pleasure and misfortune?
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Today, I thought I’d share how to process an HTTP Request so as to get the attachments to be able to send them in say an e-mail.
Here’s the context.
I have an online form, it is a WPForms, which I have no control over. The form uses a webhook to send the submission to a Power Automate Flow to process the submission (extract information, push into a database, and send various notification e-mails) which all works just fine.
Now, the form itself has been setup to allow users to include attachments.
I had a client contact me with a weird issue. They receive e-mails which are generated by a Power Automate Flow, suddenly, around August 5-7th 2024, when they use the ‘Reply’ or ‘Reply All’ buttons it doesn’t offer up the recipients e-mail address, but rather their own?!
Ok, let’s rewind for just one moment to put things into context. This Flow has been in place for a number of years and hasn’t been edited for over 2 years. So I was 100% certain it wasn’t anything I had done!
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve done a fair bit of ‘Flowing’, that is using/implementing Microsoft Power Automate Flows for a couple clients. One is particular is quite heavily invested using it to process online form, push data to SQL Azure, process e-mails, send e-mails, … It has been quite a journey and I’ve posted a few articles in the past about some of it:
and several more!
The more I work with Power Automate, and Flow in particular, the more I love and hate it at the same time.
When it works, it is exceptional!
The issue is that it doesn’t always work. I’d even go as far to say, that from my perspective they are unreliable.
I have nightly flows that typically run for 2-3 minutes (running for months and month now) and every once and a while, suddenly, out of the blue, they take 35-45 minutes and timeout never successfully running. Now nothing ever changes at my end, so it is a Microsoft/environment thing.
I have a Flow to log in-going and out-going e-mails into a central database. I’ve seen multiple instances where, for some unknown reason, a few sporadic e-mails don’t get logged?! All you get is a ‘Bad Gateway’ error with no actionable information. We also recently experienced a period of a couple minutes where every e-mail was not logged, so a guess a service failure.
Today, trying to update a Flow, I ran into a new issue. I searched online and found not a single post on the subject, so I thought I’d share my knowledge on the subject (which isn’t much). I was actively editing a Flow, trying to move an action and paste from my Clipboard and received the following error.
A very short post to simply confirm that those of your using Power Automate’s Twitter connector, it no longer authenticate since about April 20th, 2023 and you get
ActionFailed
Unauthorized
Unauthorized clientRequest
so on and so forth.
Just know you aren’t loosing your minds, and you haven’t done anything wrong! According to what I heard, the issue is entirely caused by Twitter making changes to their API.
Robert Crane has a nice blog posting about a possible workaround to the issue, so feel free to peruse it:
Just a quick word of caution with an issue I recently encountered while trying to develop a Power Automate – Flow.
I won’t bore you with all the details, but I was building a branch of a Flow and needed to add in a pause/delay and so I added a Delay Action. Everything worked fine.
Then my client decided that they no longer wanted a delay, so I set the delay Count (the interval) to 0 and saved my worked.
A little while longer, I received failure notices stating:
A word to the wise, do not count on, or even use the Undo command in Flow as it gives very unreliable results!
Flow introduced a new Undo command recently after much grovelling from its users, refer to:
The issue is that the command doesn’t work and can result in unpredictable and disastrous results!
I’ve been using Power Automate Flows for heading on 2 years now on an extensive project for one of my client’s and I thought I’d give people some more insight into my experience using them.
You can consult my original post on the subject:
I’ve used a number of connectors, such as:
and, in the process, interacted with numerous systems:
I thought I’d share a bug I came across a while back relating to Power Automate’s Flow.
Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of doing a lot of work with Flow to automate web form submissions into databases, generate e-mails, … Lots of fun stuff.
One thing most people recommend is to activate the Experimental Features (under settings) to gain access to up and coming features that have not yet been released, sort of like a preview I guess. So I did.
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