If you have been working with Power BI for a while now you might have come across the standard Power BI actions in Power Automate. They allow you to automate a nice bunch of Power BI processes. But while there is a trigger that starts a flow when a Power BI dataflow action has completed, … Read more
If you want to traverse organisational hierarchies, walk through nested folder structures or create nested Power BI metrics from an Excel table for example, you need some sort of recursive logic. In this article I will introduce you to the basic method of recursive flows in Power Automate. In upcoming articles I will share some … Read more
In a previous post I’ve described how to use a custom connector to retrieve data from the Microsoft Graph API. But this requires to register an App and adjusting the M-code in the connector itself requires some M-knowledge. So I thought it might be a good idea to share an alternative method to retrieve data from Teams for example, that works out-of-the-box. There are a couple of endpoints supported currently:
Edit 5th May 2019: Unfortunately this method will not work in the Power BI service!
Edit 23rd August 2021: Pedro del Melo Cabral Sousa has found a workaround how to make this method work in the service. I haven’t had the chance to test this out, but you might want to give it a try: “if you migrate the necessary queries to power bi dataflows and then create one big query in your report dataset with all the necessary references to the power bi dataflows together with the POST request, it will work in Power BI Service”
In my last 2 posts I’ve described a way to automatically validate attachments from incoming E-mails. Microsoft Flow would watch for incoming E-mails, that match certain criteria and move their attachments to a dedicated folder. Then it would trigger a refresh of a Power BI dataset, that has been designed to check for errors in those attachments. Data driven alerts in Power BI would indicate if there are errors and trigger a Flow that sends an E-mail back to the sender, informing him that his attachments didn’t meet the agreed criteria.
In this article I will now explain how not just a trigger about the existence of a faulty attachment could be passed back to Flow, but also the corresponding data itself. Therefore I write a query that exports data from Power BI to Flow. But watch out: This is not suitable for very big tables. I experienced timeouts at tables with 300k rows already. Also, you need a paid Power Automate license for the connector (Pricing | Microsoft Power Automate).
In Part 1 of this little series I described the core-Flow on how to automatically validate E-mail attachments with Flow and Power BI. It automatically sends an e-mail to a business partner who sent an attachment, that didn’t meet the agreed specifications:
But before going live with this Flow, you should consider the following aspects:
Receiving files from business partners that don’t match the agreed requirements/formats causes all sorts of problems in daily business. I found it particularly disturbing during month-end closing when time is really tight: You have a strict rule in which order each process has to run and there are many dependencies between them. So when then one import doesn’t work, many other processes will come to a halt as well. Fortunately, today there is a simple remedy for it: Automatically validate E-mail attachments with Flow and Power BI
You can create a Flow that “listens” for incoming emails in a mailbox that match certain criteria and contain attachments. Flow can then extract these attachments and save them to an online-folder. After that, Flow triggers a refresh of a Power BI dataset, that imports these attachments and checks for the data quality-criteria that you have defined. Then you create measures for the data quality that trigger data driven alerts from Power BI service. Flow then listens for these alerts and sends an email back to the sender, requesting for a corrected file.
This not just saves crucial time, but also your nerves (and those of your team-mates).