Microsoft Flow - Creating a flow from empty space
This chapter introduces you to the basics of a flow and thus get comfortable with creating a feed.
Before you start with Flow items, make sure you're signed in and looking at the My Flows section.
Click the New button at the top, you will be presented with the options below.
Click Instant - from the blank screen / the wizard below will appear where you can see different triggers.
Trigger
In Microsoft Flow, a trigger serves as the starting point for the flow to be built. This is the step where you specify the action that will initiate the flow. It can be select a file from a SharePoint list or just click a button on web and mobile.
For the purposes of this tutorial, let's call our Flow My First Flow . Manually trigger a stream from among the trigger choices for this stream.
Click on Create to go to the next step . You will be able to see the screen below.
As underlined above, we will now add a step. This step will be the Action resulting from the Trigger we created above. When you click the New Step button, you will be able to see the section below.
We can easily select an action from the list above. In the previous chapters, we will go into the actual details of an action.
As you can see there are different categories of actions -
- Integrated
- Standard
- Premium
- Custom
If necessary, you can select one from the actions above You may take some time to understanddre each tab and its respective options.
Steps
A collection of actions make up the steps.
For example, when you select Send email under Gmail from actions, you can see the Gmail action as shown below.
If you keep adding more actions under that particular action, then you will have created steps for your flow.
Let's add our Gmail address and establish the connection. After you have signed up with your Gmail account and provided additional permissions, you should see the screen below.
In the section in sshine above, we'll add some details. I will send myself an email with the subject line and body of the email below.
Subject - Test email
Body - This email uses Microsoft Flow.
Let's ignore the attachment part for now.
Click the Save button to capture your progress so far.
Testing a feed
If you are watching the interface after adding the trigger (and not logged into Gmail), you will be able to see three buttons in the upper right section of the screen.
The Flow Checker will be activatedat the appropriate times. This is useful for checking whether your feed is accurate or not. If you click on the flow checker in the above state, you will be able to see the screen below -
- If you look at the instruction indicated by point 1, it says: "You have an empty definition for workflow action. ”
- While these statements are best understood by an experienced Microsoft Flow user, some of the messages may also be understood by a normal / novice user.
- Necessarily, the flow checker communicates what is missing in your created flow.
- In our case, we did not log into the Gmail account, so this is reported as an error.
- At the right of the screen, you can see the stSend_email error in the Errors section.
- This way we can check for errors in our stream and thus test our stream even before running it.
Test button
