Deep Dive Into Azure Logic Apps

Introduction

Logic App is a cloud-based service. It allows us to react to an event in one service (such as SharePoint online) and do something with the data from that event in another one Service (such as Twitter). It makes it practical and simple for line-of-business. The users build workflows that automatically do business tasks and processes across applications and services. We can connect our business-critical apps and services with Azure Logic Apps, automating your workflows without writing a single line of code.

In our world, we use most services separately and enjoy their benefits alone. To avoid those cons, Microsoft introduced the Logic App service, which bridges the gap between each service/application in the form of automated workflow. It doesn't require programming and is simple to configure

Why do we use logic apps?

Logic Apps is very simple to create and use. It doesn't require deep technical knowledge or programming skills.

As our businesses are moving toward digitization, logic apps help you connect legacy, modern, and cutting-edge systems more easily and quickly. So we focus on your app's business logic and functionality. So you need not worry about building, hosting, scaling, managing, maintaining, and monitoring your apps. It handles these concerns for you. And, you pay only for what you use.

How does it work?

The processes of building workflows are based on certain connectors, triggers, and actions.

The template contains the basic building blocks of a flow. Each flow contains a combination of triggers, actions, conditions, and loops.

• Triggers are events that start a flow.
• Actions are tasks accomplished by the flow.
• Controls allow for branching statements that apply logic in a flow.
• Loops are for iterating over actions more than once.

Every flow starts with a trigger. To create a flow, the user specifies what action should take place when a specific event occurs.

Popular connectors

Connectors play an integral part when you create automated workflows with Azure Logic Apps. It contains 200+ Connectors. Connectors are organized into built-ins and managed connectors.

Built-in connectors

The following are some of the built-in connectors

Managed connectors

Here are some popular connectors for automating tasks, processes, and workflows.

Triggers and actions

If the events happen, the trigger creates and runs an instance of your logic app.

Logic Apps provides these kinds of triggers,

• Polling triggers: These triggers poll your service at a specified frequency and check for new data.
  When new data is available, a new instance of your logic app gets created and runs with the data that's passed in as input.
• Push triggers: These triggers listen for new data at an endpoint or for an event to happen, which creates and runs a new instance of your logic app.
• Recurrence trigger: This trigger creates and runs an instance of your logic app-based

Control workflow

Here are built-in actions for structuring and controlling the actions in your logic app's workflow,

Who can use logic apps?

Microsoft Flow can be used by anyone who needs automated workflows. It can be widely used by all sectors like industry, corporations, organizations, enterprises, etc..

It's very simple to create and use. It doesn't require deep technical knowledge or programming skills. So, everyone can very easily create the Logic App. It’s the line of business in the enterprise organizations.

Benefits of flow

1. The most common use of Flow is to trigger notifications, such as when your boss sends an important mail and it creates an automated workflow that can send the immediate notification to you.
2. Logic App can also be used to copy files. For example, when a new file is added to OneDrive or Dropbox, an automated workflow can instantly post a copy of the file to SharePoint.
3. Workflow can also be used to collect data. For instance, if you want to see what people are saying about your brand, you can create a trigger that will capture new tweets that mention the brand and put a copy of each tweet in an SQL database for sentiment mining with the help of Cognitive Services

Pricing

Given below is the pricing of Azure Logic Apps. Consider the South India Region & Indian Rupee, the currency.

How to build an Azure logic app?

You can start building logic apps without writing a single line of code.

Prerequisites

• Microsoft Azure Subscription.

Follow the below steps to build a Flow using a template.

Step 1. Login to https://portal.azure.com/

In the dashboard, choose Create Resource and click on Integration. Now choose Logic App

Step 2. Enter the name you gave for the logic, choose the subscription and resource group where you organize related resources, and the location where your logic app is stored. Then click on create

Step 3. Now we have the logic app overview. Here we can see the number of successful and failed runs. Then we can see the number of triggers and actions. To design the Logic App, either we use Logic App Designer or Logic App Code view.

Logic App Designer Drag & Drop the connectors to create the Logic App

Logic App Code view Writing the code to create the Logic App

Summary

This was all about the introduction to Logic App. In the next article, we will see the logic app with interesting examples. Stay tuned for more Logic App articles.