December 2018 – Note to self

Logic App Trigger Conditions

During December’s episode of Integration Downunder, Alessandro Moura showed a recap of the main features that announced for Logic Apps throughout the year. If you didn’t watch it on the day, you should take a look at the webcast.

One of the features that caught my attention, which I haven’t seen before, was the trigger condition. The ability to only fire a logic app if the condition is met. This is great for scenarios where you don’t have control over the event which triggers the logic app (like for example Dynamics 365 triggers, which only allow you to execute a logic app when a record for a given entity has been created or updated), but don’t want to implement the checks within the logic apps itself.

Resetting the State of a Logic App Trigger

This week we’ve been preparing for a Go Live in a project that integrates Dynamics 365 Field Services with an on-premises system . Part of this process was to run a series of migration script to get data from the on-prem system into D365.

Since D365 pushes the information into logic apps, I thought that the safest way to run that migration would be to simply disable the logic apps that would triggered by the process and the event would be “lost”. But to my surprise logic apps triggers are more powerful than that and remember the last event being processed. So when I turned on my logic apps after the migration, I was “rewarded” with thousands of triggers being fired…

To be honest this is quite powerful, because in cases where you had to take the logic app offline because of downstream system issues or updates, upstream systems can continue to work as expected. But how to avoid that in cases like mine – where bulk uploads (initial load or bulk updates) are not expected to flow downstream?

Hour of Code 2018

And we did it again! Me and Blanca Mansfield, which run a Python Code Club at the school, ran the Hour of Code 2018 at Arahoe Primary School, working with all classes from Year 3 to Year 6. It is the second time that we run the event at the school.

We’ve managed to do it in 2 days working with different groups of students ranging from 7 to 11 years old. The groups ranged from all year 6 students at once (60 or 70 of them) all the way to a single class of year 3 students. The lessons from last year made the organization much easier, so I didn’t need to prepare as much as I had last year.