Developer oriented documentation available?

[andy-clapham]

Hello,

I'm a developer and I'd really like to use power automate as a platform to for business processes in my organisation.

However I'm struggling with the documentation (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/), it's example/cookbook driven - as it's geared towards people who aren't developers. It's very hard to quickly grok!

Is there a more developer focused set of documentation available anwhere?

Essentially I'm looking for a step catalogue listing all available steps, with the the parameter and output object models used/returned by each type of step.

The listing should point out any specific caveats, usage/license restrictions, and give a few illustrative examples, e.g. I've just burned 1h on "get emails" search field oddly needing kql quotes escaped.

As it's not open source, I wouldn't mind some info on exactly how the execution is performed too, to check my assumptions.

Any suggestions appreciated.

[Expiscornovus · Accepted solution]

Hi @andy-clapham,

Not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for but the connectors documentation normally helps me in these kind of cases.

These docs lists all actions per connector and lists both the input parameter and in most cases also the expected outputs (unless the outputs is dynamic).

For example the Create file action:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/sharepointonline/#create-file

And the expected outputs:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/sharepointonline/#spblobmetadataresponse

Typically the connector docs also list known issues/limits:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/sharepointonline/#known-issues-and-limitations

[andy-clapham]

That's really useful, thanks!

One problem I have due to my noob lack of familiarity, is finding the step in that documentation!

Case in point, I wanted to know how to do some advanced search for emails, this is the "Get Email" step. 

I can't simply type "Get Email" into this reference - and searching everywhere for that step doesn't return anything useful.

Checking the json behind the scenes and I see the step's is an "OpenApiConnection" to "shared_office365" - however searching for that in the reference doesn't return anything either. The operationId is "GetEmailsV3" - and searching everywhere does indeed point me to the Office 365 Outlook connector which I indeed has a section for this, great! Would be nice to have a help icon that links directly from the editor...

Now relating to overall documentation - specifically looking at the Get Email's Search Query field, and there's a redirect to an article on queryparameters for the Microsoft Graph API. All good - but it's not obvious that string value needs to be escaped before the step converts it to regular url parameter encoding as per the doucment. This is just plain odd, and could do with a note somewhere. 

Just to illustrate, the json for the search definition ends up as

      "searchQuery": "subject: \\\"term A *\\\" OR subject: \\\"Other thing *\\\"",

i.e. oddly double-escaped - this usually indicates a escaping mismatch somewhere!

Anyway, thanks again for the link, I'll accept it as an answer, and just take it as how things are.

It could be a lot worse...

[Expiscornovus]

Hi @andy-clapham,

One thing to point out is that in the classic designer a lot of actions actually have a help icon. 

When you press that it should load a side help panel. In a lot of cases it should have the description of the action with a direct link to the connector document action reference/anchor link. That should help you find the correct docs.