John Liu Blog

Every drop counts

Power Platform ADFS Authentication

If you use ADFS authentication in Power Platform, you might “not” be able to create Office365 connection using a different account other than the currently login account via the normal way. When select “Use another account” option, after enter the second account email in the login prompt, it does not ask for password and automatically create the connection using your current login instead. The workaround is when the login prompt Window pop up, instead of enter the account details, copy the URL from the login address bar and paste the URL into Notepad.

Posted by John Liu Saturday, September 9, 2023

Power Automate extract email alias address

One can use Azure PowerAutomate to process files received via email. We can setup one central email account and create different email alias for different client where PowerAutomate only need to mornitor one email account. Howerver, PowerAutomate doesn’t (at the time of this article) expose the alias email address in the Office365 Outlook email action. One solution to address this challenge is to use Azure Function App to extract the alias email address from the email body using Regex.

Posted by John Liu Saturday, April 16, 2022

Power Automate file contents base64

When using Power Automate flow to upload a CSV file to SQL server, the base64 value in the flow will be converted to a UTF-8 binary value if the target column data type is varbinary, or the raw base64 string value if the column data type is varchar/nvarchar. However, when the original data contains unicode string value like Chinese character, the varbinary data type will not be able to be converted back to its original unicode text.

Posted by John Liu Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Automate email process

Note: When design Power Automate flow, for file path or folder path values, try not to pick from the dropdown list, but instead type in the actual name. When picking from the dropdown list, the designer will undercover save the actual internal physical ID of the location as well. If you then try to export the package and modify it for a different folder, it will be hard as the physical ID will no longer match with the one for the new location.

Posted by John Liu Monday, March 7, 2022