In my previous article onIntroduction to Azure Logic Apps, I have explained what are logic apps and how do they work. In that article I also have explained basic terminology.
In this article we will have look at how to create a simple Logic App using Azure Portal.
You will need to Azure Portal access to understand the topic. If you do not have access, then you can create free account on Azure.
The Workflow Scenario
We all know that every month there are some announcements done by Azure team. I am assuming we all will be interested to know the new announcements.
So, in this demo, we will see how to post a new message to Microsoft Teams whenever there is a new announcements published on RSS feed.
So, trigger will be the RSS feed and action would be posting a message to Microsoft Teams.
So, Let’s get started !
In Azure Portal, go to “+ Create a resource” link.
This would open a search panel where you can search the service to be created. You can search for “Logic App” and once you click on autocomplete suggestion, it would open the create logic app panel.
Alternatively, instead of searching Logic App, you can click on Integration menu, and then select “Logic App” to open the logic app create panel.
Logic App Create Panel
On this panel, you will have to provide the name of logic app, location/region where this should be created and resource group name where you want to place it.
You can either create a new resource group or place the new logic app in existing resource group.
Logic App Designer
The logic app instance can then be opened from the portal. It will show a UI which is similar to below snapshot.
Then you can click on Logic app designer to start creating the workflow.
Alternatively if you want to write a source code in form of ARM template, then you can click on Logic App code view (which is just below the designer view button) and it will bring up the json editor and ARM schema for you.
Please note that you can create the logic app in Visual Studio and Visual Studio code as well. Visual Studio provides UI interface similar to what is being discussed in this article. In visual studio code, you can author the ARM template as mentioned here.
Select a trigger for workflow
Select blank logic app, which is first option in templates section. This will open the designer where you can create your logic app.
Now search for “RSS” and under triggers header, you will be able to find the RSS trigger.
Once this is selected, it will show a UI like below.
There you can configure the polling interval and any other additional parameters. You need to specify the RSS feed url. For this demo, I have selected RSS feed URL for Azure updates feed.
Select action for the workflow
Then click on the Next Step button in the workflow.
Next, search for the “Microsoft Teams“. Once you select you would be shown options similar to below. Select Microsoft Teams from the list.
After selecting Microsoft Teams, Azure will show you list of actions which can be performed. The UI will look similar to below.
Select “Post Message” action.
Login to the Microsoft Teams
Once post a message action is selected, it will show UI similar to below. You will need to login to Microsoft Teams using your own account.
Configure message format
Once this login is done, you can configure this step and specify below details:
- The team where message should be posted
- The channel where the message should be posted
- What details from RSS feed should be posted. We have selected Feed ID, title and summary.
And that’s it. We are done.
Whenever there is a new feed, it will be posted in your teams.
Ready to use templates on Azure
Similar to this you can create a lot of different kind of integration workflows. You can create workflow to post the image to twitter as soon as it was posted on instagram, or you can write workflow to post your tweet on facebook timeline.
You can also write workflow to copy files from your dropbox to onedrive or you can create custom workflow depending on the data in your application database.
There are multiple ready-to-use templates available in Azure for this.
I hope you found this information interesting. Please do comment and let me know your thoughts.