Overcome PowerApps connectors limits with Flow (without code)

Don't you think the no-code & low-code momentum is amazing ? Enabling people without development skills to embrace technology and create new ways of doing things ? Maybe you already built your first own app, and if you don't, I encourage you to do so :

• for inspiration, look our customers stories like Avanade, The Red Cross, National Trust, IPS, Pepsi, Carglass, and more )
• for learning, you can follow our learning paths, and browse the documentation

Now let's assume that you already built a few apps, and you face a situation where the data you need for your app cannot be retrieved by the standard connector. This can be for example because the request to get the data is too complex to be handled by the connector. Of course, you can follow the custom development path. But wait, you are using a low-code platform, so there must be a better way...

When using a low-code platform, always look for low code solution first. And if you did not found one, look again !

For the sake of clarity, i'll consider that data is hosted on Dynamics365, but the approach applies to any standard connector.

1. Decompose the problem you are trying to solve. Here, I need to (A)Retrieve data from within an app, (B)Authenticate, (C)build a complex query, and (D)call the API to execute this query
2. Search a no-code solution for each of your steps. For (A), we will use Microsoft Flow . For (B and D), Flow includes HTTP with Azure AD, a generic connector to web services that manages authentication for you. For (C), you can build and save complex requests using advanced find, and call these predefined requests from the API.

Here is an overview of the solution

Under the hood

Now, let's take a look at this in details, starting with the request in Dynamics. Here, there is already a view that shows the data I need, I just need to get it's internal ID. For this, i can email a link of the current view, and get the GUID from the URL.

Now that I have the GUID, I can build the flow to retrieve the data with 3 steps : PowerApps trigger, call Dynamics365 API using the HTTP with Azure AD connector, and the

Now, we just need to call the flow from power apps

That's it !