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!
For months, if not years, MS and certain fellow MVPs have been promoting the virtues of Microsoft Flow. Until recently, I simply never had a reason to even look at it as I had no need for any of its supposed capabilities. That said, working on a new project for one of my clients and a new request by my client made me look into one particular aspect of Flow, the MySQL Connector.
In the scenario we are talking about in this posting, I had a pretty simple MySQL database in which we wanted to create a table to save information relating to incoming and outgoing e-mails. Now since their e-mails are all through Office 365 and Flow now offers a PREMIUM (you pay extra for) MySQL connector, I had all the ingredients to make a go of things.