Power Automate

Sometimes strings in Power Automate need to be reformatted so that the first letter of each word is capitalized. This is know as “Proper Case”. There is no function built in to perform this common task. PowerApps does have this function so I expect it will arrive on Power Automate eventually.

In the mean time, here is an example flow and the required code to convert a string to Proper Case. The goal is to transform the sample string “this is a TEST” to “This Is A Test”

Example Proper Case Flow

Proper case is simple to achieve, take a look at this sample flow:

Explanation:

• The phrase to be transformed is added to a compose step.
• An apply to each is started and the input is a split expression which splits the phrase into an array.
• Each word is then passed into an expression which makes the first letter of the word uppercase and the remainder lower case.
• The final step of the flow uses a join expression to put the phrase back together again with spaces between each word.

The expression in the flow step “Capitalize each word” is:

if
(
  equals(length(item()),1),
  toupper(item()),
  concat(first(toupper(item())),toLower(substring(item(),1,sub(length(item()),1))))  
)

Explanation of the expression:

• If the length of the word is only 1 letter, just output the uppercase representation of the word.
• If the word is longer than 1 character then uppercase the first letter of the word and lowercase the remainder.

I decided to write this up after someone asked how this could be done on the Power Automate community forums. He was following a blog post written by Elaiza Benitez that performs the same function.

My flow is mostly the same, but also works when one of the words has only one letter.

Hope this helps you out until the Power Automate team add a Proper Case function.

In this post I am going to demonstrate how to collect data from a SharePoint list using Power Automate and publish it in a jQuery grid on any website. Many businesses store data in data sources that are easily accessible by Power Automate that might be useful to share externally. For example, stock levels, upcoming events, price lists etc.

This is easy to do with a small amount of code and saves you having to create guest access to your Office 365 environment. Power Automate can compile a JSON array as a data source to a jQuery grid.

Take a look at the following SharePoint list:

Using the above data, the parts list is going to be exposed to the public web, but the cost and margin columns will be excluded, and the list will be filtered so that only items where “Show on Web” is set to yes.

This data source could be anything that is accessible to Flow:

• Excel Data
• SQL Server
• CDS
• Oracle
• MySQL
• etc

The table below is a live working example of what this flow will demonstrate, as you can see:

• It’s very fast and easy to browse.
• Searching is virtually instant.
• It’s possible to group items easily.
• Filtering is simple.

How to build the flow

The flow is really easy to build and requires only a few steps, the trigger action is “When a HTTP request is received”.

Filter the data

The first action in the flow is the “Get Items” from SharePoint. This has an oData filter query so that it only retrieves items where “Show on Web?” is set to yes:

Reduce the JSON data from Get Items

The JSON returned by SharePoint is quite heavy, some of the the columns are not required and none of the metadata is needed for the grid. So a select action is used to reshape the data and create new column names:

You can really see the value of this when you compare one record from the “Get Items” action to one record from the select.

A single record from the select action looks like this:

  {
    "Part": "716/27600",
    "Description": "FUEL SENDER UNIT - P12",
    "Price": 67.75,
    "Stock": 25,
    "Product Group": "Standard Product"
  }

As you can see, it contains only the information required to build a grid in the browser.

Send the JSON response to the browser

The final step is just a HTTP response configured in the most basic way. It simply sends the output of the select action.

The entire flow consists of four steps and looks like this (Click to Zoom):

Build the Browser page for the grid

The table above was built using the DevExpress DataGrid, but the method is very similar for many jQuery based datagrid components. The amount of code is minimal.

The html for the grid consists only of a couple of DIVs:

<div class="demo-container">
  <div id="gridContainer"></div>
</div>

Everything else is done from jQuery. Three lines in the head section:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn3.devexpress.com/jslib/20.2.3/css/dx.common.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn3.devexpress.com/jslib/20.2.3/css/dx.light.css">
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdn3.devexpress.com/jslib/20.2.3/js/dx.all.js"></script>

And one script on the page that pulls the data from Power Automate:

<script>
jQuery(function(){
    jQuery("#gridContainer").dxDataGrid({
        dataSource: "https://prod-03.westeurope.logic.azure.com:443/workflows/...",
        columns: ["Part", "Description", "Price", "Stock", "Product Group"],
        showBorders: true,
		paging: {
            pageSize: 10
        },
        pager: {
            showPageSizeSelector: true,
            allowedPageSizes: [10, 25, 50, 100, 200]
        },
        remoteOperations: false,
        searchPanel: {
            visible: true,
            highlightCaseSensitive: true
        },
        groupPanel: { visible: true },
        grouping: {
            autoExpandAll: false
        },
		filterRow: { visible: true },
        allowColumnReordering: true,
        rowAlternationEnabled: true
    });
});
</script>

The datagrid component has many more options that I did not configure, and could have been setup with even less code than I used.

This is an easy to implement, but quite powerful use for Power Automate. If you only want to provide a small subset of data to users outside of your organisation then you don’t need to setup guest access to your environment, so it really is an easy solution.

Something to consider is that if you are going to do this on a webpage that gets many visitors per day then you are going to go through flow runs quite quickly. An alternative would be to run the flow on a schedule and output the JSON to a file which is publicly reachable. This will produce a faster response to the browser and save your flow usage.

If you would like to copy the source code, go to this demo page and view source in your browser.

If you are updating the status of a document in a Microsoft Power Automate flow that someone is already using, you will get this error:

The file "filename.docx" is locked for shared use by [email protected]

and it will return a HTTP Status code of 400:

Below is a method that waits for the file to be free and then moves to the next step:

Wait for the file to be unlocked

Here is an example flow which updates the status of a file stored in SharePoint. If the file is available it will work normally. If it is locked it will loop for an increasing amount of time before attempting the operating again:

Here is how it works:

• A Boolean variable is created called “documentLocked” and its value is set to True. This variable is used to control the loop.
• An integer variable called delaySeconds is created and its value is set to 1. This variable defines how long the loop will wait for before attempting to access the file again.
• A do until loop is then started which will continue until the value of documentLocked is equal to false.
• The “Update File Properties” action is executed as normal.
• The next action is configured to run if “Update File Properties” was successful, or if it failed:
  
  An expression is used to determine the value of the variable based on the locked status of the document.
• An increment variable action is then used to increase the delay time on the subsequent loop by 60 seconds. Each iteration of the loop will create a longer delay.

The expression used in the “Set Variable” step is:

if
(
  and
  (
    equals(outputs('Update_file_properties')?['body']?['status'],400), 
	contains(outputs('Update_file_properties')?['body']?['message'], 'locked')
  )
  ,true
  ,false
)

The condition checks to see if the output of the “Update File Properties” resulted in an error code 400 and the error message contained the word “locked”. If both of those conditions are true then documentLocked is set to true, otherwise it is set to false.

Both the status code and message are checked because HTTP Status code 400 is vague and the error might not actually be related to a file lock.

The expression in the delay action is:

if(variables('documentLocked'),variables('delaySeconds'),1)

This condition checks if the document is locked:

• If it is locked, delay seconds is set to the value of the variable delaySeconds.
• If it is free, then it is set to 1.

I’ve used this technique a number of times and it’s worked really well, and is simple to implement.