Book Image

Workflow Automation with Microsoft Power Automate - Second Edition

By : Aaron Guilmette
4 (2)
Book Image

Workflow Automation with Microsoft Power Automate - Second Edition

4 (2)
By: Aaron Guilmette

Overview of this book

MS Power Automate is a workflow automation tool built into MS 365 to help businesses automate repetitive tasks or trigger business processes without user intervention. It is a low-code tool that is part of the Microsoft applications framework, the Power Platform. If you are new to Power Automate, this book will give you a comprehensive introduction and a smooth transition from beginner to advanced topics to help you get up to speed with business process automation. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will show you how to configure automation workflows for business processes between hundreds of applications, using examples within Microsoft and including third-party apps like Dropbox and Twitter. Once you understand how to use connectors, triggers, and actions to automate business processes, you’ll learn how to manage user input, documents, and approvals, as well as interact with databases. This edition also introduces new Power Automate features such as using robotic process automation (RPA) to automate legacy applications, interacting with the Microsoft Graph API, and working with artificial intelligence models to do sentiment analysis. By the end of this digital transformation book, you’ll have mastered the basics of using Power Automate to replace repetitive tasks with automation technology.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
20
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21
Index

Creating a connection to a database

As you learned earlier in the chapter, when working with databases, you’ll need to tell an application how to connect to a database. That data is stored in a configuration object generally called a connection string. In Power Automate, the connection string data is referred to as a connection.

Connection details will depend on the type of database you’re connecting to, but the most common fields or properties that you’ll need to populate include a server name or IP address, credentials, port numbers, and a database name.

To connect to a database in Power Automate, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the Power Automate web portal (https://flow.microsoft.com). Expand Data and click Connections.
  2. Select New connection:

Figure 12.10: Creating a new connection

  1. Select SQL Server from the list of connection types:

Figure 12.11: Selecting the SQL Server connection type

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