The SharePoint Guru

Recently I’ve been looking into fine tuning Power Automate for performance, a customer needs a large regular data load into the Dataverse, the number of records keeps growing and my fine tuning keeps improving performance. A thank you to John Liu and some information from the 2019 power platform conference (check this youtube video out to get some great performance pointers). My next evolution was to see what would happen if I used Logic Apps, that’ll surely make things quicker right? My scenario is grabbing circa half a million records using GraphQL http requests and adding/updating them to Dataverse, doing some logic and lookups along the way. I decided to make a crude example just to see what the performance was like, I created a source repository to mimic a large data set, added 10,000 items, with 20 fields, 19 of which were guids and 1 date field just to represent a reasonable chunk of data. Both of the examples below I run the apply to each with concurrency set to max! (50...

This also applies to other TimeZones. When you query SharePoint in Power Automate using steps like "Get Items" the raw information that is returned when you are working with dates and currently inside British Summer Time will be out by an hour. Below I've created a step which runs Get Items and I add a compose to check the Created date: Going into SharePoint you can see the date time returned is an hour out (I'm currently inside British Summer Time and my laptops date/time is set as such). Whenever you are handling dates from SharePoint in Power Automate you have to remember that the original value stored in SharePoint for date/time is the UTC value. Depending on your regional settings the value is converted for you when it's rendered. Fear not! Power Automate has conversions, here's one way: In the example above I'm taking the source Created date/time which is in UTC and converting it to my location - Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London. The expected Create...

Something I found relatively difficult to find online is what to do when I have two tables and I want to create a many to many relationship but additionally hold extra columns about that relationship. When dealing with regular databases you would create a join table (intermediate table) which would hold a one to many relationship between tables: Creating a many to many relationship is pretty straight forward in Dataverse and there is an out of the box relationship builder to do that, however any joiner table is hidden and you can't customise this. This guide explains a really simple way to hook the joiner table up, as when I tried to make the one to many relationships manually and add data using a model driven app, the relationship wasn't being recognised. Some Background My example takes a very simple "Building Project" log book which is to hold information about building jobs and the contractors associated to that job. The contractors will be coming from the default...

The following provides a guide on how to add an approval Power Automate workflow to any Document Library in your tenant just by adding a JSON formatted column to your library! A previous client had a requirement to create some global approval templates across the whole of their SharePoint Online Tenant. Power Automate is a great tool for this with its integration with Microsoft Approvals which gives the end user a slick experience being able to approve/reject documents from email or Teams. The problem with most approval templates is an individual workflow has to be deployed to every Library as they run on the "For a selected file" step, which can't be dynamic... or can it!? My colleague Robin Pemberton created an original set of approval templates, one with a multi-step approval, one where everyone must approve, one where only one person needs to approve which we then provided to the business on how to deploy this to their SharePoint libraries, with a long set of instruc...