Overview Of Azure Logic App And Creating Your First Logic App

Introduction

If you are not aware of the Azure Cloud, then go through the details of it in my previous articles.

1. An Overview of Cloud And Azure Cloud
2. Pillars of Cloud And Azure Services

In this article, we will get the overview of logic app service with one example.

Scenario

These articles will help you to understand what a Logic App is, where it is to be used, and what are the benefits of Logic Apps. We will also create one example of the logic app by executing the steps one by one.

Pre-requisite 

• Basic knowledge of Azure services

Background

• If we want to build a business process, then it consists of one trigger to start the process and a series of activities/steps to complete that process.
• Workflow can be developed by using several tools like MS. Flow, .NET workflow framework, custom code or third-party tools like, for SharePoint – Nintex.
• In Azure, we have one logic app service which we can use to build such type of workflows with no code solution with drag and drop approach.

What is the logic app and what are the benefits of using it?

• The logic app comes under the ‘Integration’ category.
• The logic app helps us to quickly build automated workflows with no code solution.
• It has built in numerous templates to help the developer quickly build the workflows.
• 200+ connectors are present to connect logic from the various different source like SharePoint, Outlook, FTP, Twitter etc.
• Create workflows by using a web browser, visual studio, visual studio code tools
• Cost for execution of the logic app is negligible - you pay only for what you use based on a consumption
• Quick and fastest way to build, deploy and run logic app instances
• We can extend capabilities of the logic app by connecting to custom code components like functions etc.
• The logic app can integrate with other Azure services like service bus, azure function etc.
• We can create a single logic and reuse it later by creating a template of it.

To develop any type of workflow, we should be aware of what connector, trigger, and actions are.

Now, we will see this one by one

Connector

• The connector is used to connect your data source system with the logic app. It can be like SharePoint, SQL, OneDrive etc.
• There are more than 100 built-in connectors present in the logic app
• The data source can be of cloud data source or on-premise data source
• We can also build our own custom connectors

Trigger

• Logic app actions run on specific triggers based on the business process; e.g. When the file is added to one drive location when a record is modified in SharePoint etc.
• The trigger is nothing but passing an event to notify the logic app to start the series of actions
• There are three types of triggers,
  
  
• Polling triggers - 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 on a specified schedule; e.g. timer jobs

Actions

• Actions are nothing but a series of activities to complete the business process
• Every action has its own operation e.g. take approval, send an email, add an item to data source etc.
• Actions run after the trigger event.

Now, build and run your first logic app -- send an email when the item is modified on SharePoint list

Step 1

Sign in to the Azure portal with your Azure account credentials.

Step 2

Click on ‘Create Source’ link, then navigate to the Integration section and select ‘logic app’.

 

Step 3

Fill details of a logic app like name, its resource group, location etc. and click on create a button.

 

Step 4

The system will open the logic app designer window on which you will see a list of templates to build workflows quickly or we can create it from a blank.

I am selecting ‘Send an email when an item in a SharePoint list is modified template’

 

Step 5

Then sign to your SharePoint site,

 

Step 6

Sign in to Outlook as well like the above step. Once the sign-in process is completed then click on the continue button.

Step 7

Enter site address (URL) and select list from that site to trigger the workflow actions.

 

Step 8

Add to address of email (can be static or dynamic) and other details of email

 

Step 10

Click on the Save button.

 

Now your logic app workflow is ready to use.

Step 11

Open your SharePoint site in a browser and modify list item from respectively configured SharePoint list, the recipient will receive an email immediately.

 

 

 

 

I hope you like this article and understand the logic app. I will keep sharing my knowledge, stay tuned.