Microsoft Flows Handle XML Data

Similar to JSON Parser, there is no direct available actions to handle XML Data in Flows. But we do have 2 functions that can be used in expressions, xpath() and xml(). we will be going through these functions as below.

XML function will take JSON object data or any XML formatted string and converts it into an XML object. And, if we use JSON object, make sure there is a root property (only one) and not an array object.

 xml(json('{"EmployeeName":"Lucky"}'))  
Returns  
 <EmployeeName>Lucky</EmployeeName> 
 
 xml(json('{"Records":{"Employee":[{"Name":"Lucky","Id":"12345"},
                                   {"Name":"Raga","Id":"54321"}]}}'))  
Returns  
 <Records>
  <Employee>
    <Name>Lucky</Name>
    <Id>12345</Id>
 </Employee>
 <Employee>
    <Name>Raga</Name>
    <Id>54321</Id>
 </Employee>
</Records>  

xml('<Employee>Lucky</Employee>')
Returns
<Employee>
   Lucky
</Employee>

 xml(json('{"Name":"Lucky","Id":"12345"}'))  
 This fails as there are 2 parent properties  

XPATH function is used to navigate through XML and fetch the node content. This function has 2 inputs, first one is the XML object and second one is XPATH expression. And, returns array or XML nodes or the values in nodes as per given XPATH

Lets consider below sample XML

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>  
 <Records>  
      <Employee>  
           <Id>1234</Id>  
           <Name>John, Velvet</Name>  
           <Role>Senior Developer</Role>  
           <Salary>15000</Salary>  
      </Employee>  
      <Employee>  
           <Id>3424</Id>  
           <Name>Angel, Josh</Name>  
           <Role>Developer</Role>  
           <Salary>12000</Salary>  
      </Employee>  
      <Employee>  
           <Id>5421</Id>  
           <Name>Tim, Kary</Name>  
           <Role>Tech Lead</Role>  
           <Salary>18000</Salary>  
      </Employee>  
 </Records>  

We can refer to below XPATH expressions to pull data

 xpath(xml(outputs('xmlContent')),'/Records/Employee')  
 Returns array of EMployee Nodes with XML data in them.  
 [  
      '<Employee>  
           <Id>1234</Id>  
           <Name>John, Velvet</Name>  
           <Role>Senior Developer</Role>  
           <Salary>15000</Salary>  
      </Employee>'  
      ,  
      '<Employee>  
           <Id>3424</Id>  
           <Name>Angel, Josh</Name>  
           <Role>Developer</Role>  
           <Salary>12000</Salary>  
      </Employee>'  
      ,  
      '<Employee>  
           <Id>5421</Id>  
           <Name>Tim, Kary</Name>  
           <Role>Tech Lead</Role>  
           <Salary>18000</Salary>  
      </Employee>'  
 ]  

 xpath(xml(outputs('xmlContent')),'//Name')  
 Returns, array of values of all Nodes with "Name",  
 ['<Name>John, Velvet</Name>','<Name>Angel, Josh</Name>','<Name>Tim, Kary</Name>'] 
 
 xpath(xml(outputs('xmlContent')),'/Records/Employee/Name')  
 Returns, array of Names under Employee/Records nodes  
 ['<Name>John, Velvet</Name>','<Name>Angel, Josh</Name>','<Name>Tim, Kary</Name>']  

 xpath(xml(outputs('xmlContent')),'sum(/Records/Employee/Salary)')  
 Returns, sums up the values from the xpath node values.  
 45000  

 xpath(xml('<employee>Lucky</employee>'),'string(.)')  
 Returns, value in the Node.  
 Lucky  

As we get the response in Array, we can use Apply to Each or Join Operations to go through the content.

Note: When we directly look into the action ouputs in flow history, it would be in encoded format. Once you access into any actions, it will be decoded. 

Thanks to Raga for looking into this along with me. 

Microsoft Flows: Send an email to Sharepoint Group

Microsoft Flows doesn't have direct access to Sharepoint Groups. So, we need to use Rest API to fetch group members from a sharepoint group. Also, to send an email, we need Email IDs, thus we extract email ids of all group members from the Rest Response and use them in Email Notification.

Below are the step by step procedure to achieve it .

1. Use Send an HTTP Request to Sharepoint action to call below Rest API to fetch group members
   /_api/web/sitegroups/getbyname('<<GroupName>>')/users?$select=email&$filter=PrincipalType%20eq%201
   
   Here we are selecting only email as we don't need other information. Also, we filtered for PrincipalType to 1 so that we want only Users from the Group. If we want other types, we can update the filter. 
   

   

   
   
2. As the response from HTTP request is in JSON (default), we need to use Parse JSON action to parse the response. 
   
   

   

   
   The content for this action is output of HTTP call and for Schema, we can click on Generate from Sample and  paste the RAW response from HTTP action to it.
   
   
3. Now we have the response with List of Users in Object Collection, we need to extract EMails from it.  We can use Apply to Each action, but we will go with better performance actions - Select and Join as discussed in earlier post
   
   

   

   Select action is to Extract only Emails for the Object collection and convert to simply array of Emails.
   Join action is to join the Emails in array with semi-column delimiter
   
   
4. Now we have all the Email ids in output of Join action and we can use it in Email Notification.
   

   
   

Happy coding :-)

Set Permissions on a Sharepoint list Item using Microsoft Flows

There are no actions yet available to set permissions on a Sharepoint List Item. we need to use Rest APIs through Send an HTTP Request to SharePoint action. In this article, we shall go through all the Rest APIs we are going to use for permissions.

• First, we need to break inheritance of the Item / Sharepoint object, below is the Post call
  breakroleinheritance(copyRoleAssignments=true, clearSubscopes=true)
• CopyRoleAssignments: this will maintain existing permissions. If set to false, clears existing assignments / permissions
• clearSubscopes: this is used for items / objects below current object, i.e., if we are breaking permissions on List, this property controls for list items.
• Next, we need to assign roles, this could to be a user / group.  below is the post call.
  /roleassignments/addroleassignment(principalid=,roleDefId=)
• Principalid: It is the ID of User / SP Group we are going to assign. We can get IDs of user using service /_api/web /siteusers and for group, /_api/web/sitegroups
  

  
  
• roleDefId: Its is the ID of Permission Role we want to assign to. We can get Role IDs, using the service /_api/web/roledefinitions
  

  
  

We can do only one role assignment to one user / group at a time. As there would be multiple Rest API calls, we use Batch Requests to achieve this in single call.

The syntax to batch call is as below,

  --BatchID   
  content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary=ChangesetID   
  Host:    
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary  
  --ChangesetID   
  content-type: application/http   
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary   
  <<service call>> HTTP/1.1   
  --ChangesetID   
  content-type: application/http   
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary   
  <<service call>> HTTP/1.1   
  --ChangesetID--   
  --BatchID--   

Using above format, we can merge all the role assignments to one batch call by using Send an HTTP request to Sharepoint.

Here,  create 2 GUIDs to use for Batch and Changeset, expression is guid()

then, use HTTP request action as in below image