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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I was helping out in a forum discussion in which a developer was asking for assistance in getting a listing of URLs found within a string of text and thought I’d share here the solution(s) I came up with as I’m sure he’s not the first, nor the last to need to do this type of thing.
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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.
Looking through an old database I had created I came across some code I had put together a while back to read and write INI files.
If you’ve searched online a little, I’m sure you’ve found APIs such as the GetPrivateProfileString function, that can be used to do this, but as much as I can, I try to minimize my use of ActiveX and APIs and this is one case where an API is not required to perform basic text search and writing, because after all an INI file is nothing more than a text file.
As time has passed, I’ve also learnt the value of using INI files to store user preferences. While it is possible to store such data in the database front-end itself, it is lost upon updating. Another option would be to use the registry, but I dislike using the registry except for registration information and the likes. Beyond which, registry settings cannot easily be pushed out to other new computers. By using a simple INI file, you can store any information you choose, it remains intact when updates are performed and can be transferred with great ease to other computers so the user can retain their settings.
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In a previous post I demonstrated several ways we could extract the whole number from a decimal value:
Today, I thought we should examine the flip side of that same issue and see how we can retrieve just the decimal portion of a number (or mathematical operation) using VBA.
Over the years, I’ve published numerous articles about 1 off WIA functions:
and many others.
I decided that I explore taking all of these functions and transform them into a Class module.
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One thing that keeps coming up with clients, friends, family over the past few years is how annoying Microsoft has made it to see and click on the scrollbars in our applications. At times it can be infuriating.
Well, there is a simple fix!
Sometimes we wish to extract the whole number from a decimal value.
So say you are doing an arythmatic like:
43/5
Which returns a value of:
8.6
and you wish to solely extract the whole number, thus you wish to get:
8
Here are a few techniques you can employ in VBA.
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Have you ever loaded an image into say an Access Image control, or ‘legacy’ Web Browser control, only to have the image display flipped and/or rotated like:
when if you open it in most image software, preview it in explorer, open it in most modern day web browsers it displays just fine like:
and wondered what was going on exactly.
This happens because of something called the Exif Orientation tag, which is a piece of metadata stored inside many JPEG images by cameras.
Basically, when you take a photo, your camera records how you were holding the device (upright, sideways, upside down, etc.) and saves this information in the Exif Orientation tag (this is hidden information that is stored with the image). Instead of actually rotating the pixels in the image file, the camera just notes the orientation in the metadata. Some programs, like Windows Explorer, read this tag and automatically display the image in the correct orientation. Other programs might ignore the Exif Orientation tag and show the image as it is physically stored, which can result in the image appearing sideways or upside down
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Trying to help out in a forum question
in which James had an interesting issue he wanted to address.
He had a continuous form and wanted to go to a new record, but wanted to still display records in the form rather than the default where the new entry is at the top of the form and you can’t see any of the previous records.
Now I know this is somewhat of a niche, uncommon need, but I still thought it was worth taking a moment to explore together and see how it can be resolved.
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