How to call a custom connector from powerapp passing raw body as input

[Ancy]

Hello everyone,

I have a postman collection having Body in the form of "raw"

I have created a custom connector with above postman collection. Now I want to call this connector.

How could I pass the raw data to the body parameter of the connector?

Please help.

[v-xida-msft]

Hi @Ancy,

It is not necessary to pass a Raw data  as a Body Parameter value into your custom connector. You could consider edit the Body Parameter part, then edit the parameters that you defined within your API.

Please check and see if the following article would help in your scenario:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/custom-connectors/define-postman-collection#update-gener...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/custom-connectors/create-postman-collection

Best regards,

Kris

Best regards,

Kris

[HEATFreight]

@v-xida-msft  Nice non-answer to the question! You've simply not understood what is being asked, and if your solution were useful, @Ancy's  question wouldn't even need to be asked in the first place.

I have the same problem. I have a custom connector that works within itself using the "Test Operation" button, but when I call it from a Power App, the request body is null. Technically the API call should work fine if the body is passed in as "body": {} but Power Apps Monitor shows that it's sending "body": "". To clarify, within the custom connector, if we run the Test with no input to the body, the request body gets passed in as {} and the response is successful. However if we call up this connector from within a Power App, the body is passed in as "" and the response looks like this:

{
  "duration": 450.39,
  "size": 137,
  "status": 400,
  "headers": {
    "Content-Length": 137,
    "Content-Type": "application/json; charset=utf-8",
    "Date": "Wed, 22 Sep 2021 15:48:09 GMT",
    "x-correlation-id": "...",
    "x-ms-apihub-cached-response": false,
    "x-powered-by": "ARR/3.0,ASP.NET",
    "x-ms-client-request-id": "..."
  },
  "body": [
    {
      "success": false,
      "data": null,
      "statusSet": [
        {
          "code": 6,
          "descriptor": "UnableToParse",
          "message": "The input field is required.",
          "field": ""
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Based on testing this API in Postman with an empty body, that response means that my request has failed because there has to be a body, even if the body is literally just an empty pair of curly brackets: {}.

Whereas I can get the Power App to suggest the header arguments (assuming I set their visibility to "important" rather than "none") and I am able to pass in the headers just fine, but I am unable to get the body parameters to populate the formula suggestions. I have tried this by using {} for the body field in "Import from Sample" in the custom connector definition, and I have obviously also tried this using an actual sample of the body. Either way, neither the body nor its parameters are suggested as arguments in the Power App function editor.

To simplify the troubleshooting process, I have hard-coded the headers into the custom connector for now and made their visibility "none". This way I should be able to call up the custom connector with no input arguments. This works when I click "Test Operation" within the custom connector. And in fact, since we are getting an API response totally unrelated to a failed authorization, I can tell that my hard-coded headers are working fine when calling the custom connector from Power Apps. The error is 100% related to the missing body. I should be able to pass in the raw body as an argument within Power Apps, or I would think so anyway, but I can't figure out how. Or I should be able to set visibility on body parameters to "Important" and then they should show up as suggested arguments in the function editor. But I am not able to make this work.

It's unclear to me what syntax would be necessary here, or how to get those body parameters to fully populate as suggested arguments in the Power Apps function editor.

Would greatly appreciate if any API wizards have some insight!

Thanks

[HEATFreight]

Here's an example of a valid body:

{
  "pagination": {
    "pageNumber": 1,
    "pageSize": 999
  }
}

Another valid body example:

{}

I have the default values for pageNumber and pageSize hardcoded in the custom connector. That works when testing within custom connector itself.

I can remove the hardcoded values entirely, and THAT WORKS! But only when testing within custom connector itself.

I am unable to get any kind of body to be passed in with the API call when I run the custom connector within the Power App. I am removing the data connection for the custom connector from the Power App and then adding it back again every single time I make a change to the custom connector. If I don't do this, it's not clear to me that the changes to the custom connector are recognized in the Power App...

Literally all I need to do is pass in a body —any body at all, I don't care what it is as long as it's not a null string! If I could get it to pass a body to the API call, I could get it to work.

I have implemented a trick to dynamically pass in the Access-Token argument from Power App using a policy in the custom connector to set Authorization header to @headers('Access-Token'). The header "Access-Token" is either hardcoded or set to visibility: "important" and passed in as argument in Power App. Either way works.

This is important because I am unable to use the API Key method of setting up this connector. Well I could, and that would work, but it wouldn't be able to be set dynamically. The Access-Token expires every 20 minutes and I am unable to generate new access tokens using the custom connector because custom connectors do not allow an authorization header like:

Authorization Basic <base 64 encoded string>

The custom connector will always change the authorization header to:

Authorization Bearer <some random string of whose origin I have no idea>

Anyway, so that's sort of irrelevant to the null body problem, but it makes me wonder if there's a way to set a policy in the custom connector to specify a proper request body. I think I'll try to use a "Set Property" policy to set the body properties, thus the body should never be null...hopefully.

I had wanted to add a policy to set the body itself, but that does not seem possible. But it is possible set properties of the body. If this policy overrides the null body that Power Apps seems to be sending, then that might be the solution. However, I have other API calls to make which need dynamic body properties. I think I may have to add these as headers, as I did with the Access-Token, such that I can get the Power App function editor to recognize them as proper arguments.

I suppose the fundamental problem here is that Power Apps is not able to recognize the body properties and take them as arguments. Or if it can, it's not clear what I'm missing.

[HEATFreight]

fwiw, I am building custom connectors from scratch because I have had zero success importing from Postman collections (V1, V2, V2.1 all tried with no success). So I have to immediately disregard any suggestions of importing Postman collections as it seems totally broken as far as I can tell. Importing Postman collections does not create a working custom connector in my use case, and I have tried all three Postman versions.

[JezLomax]

Guys, I managed to fix my issue relating to this subject.

Basically, the Postman import didnt work correctly. It was specifying the attribute as a string, when in fact it needed to be an object. I edited this in the swagger editor in the customer connector:

I then built up the Object thus in my flow and sent it into the custom connector.

[JezLomax]

Oh and one further note, It also got some of the data types wrong on the response as well! I edited these in the swagger editor as well and all was good.

[petecarl]

I hope this helps anyone trying to do this specifically in PowerApps.

1. In the custom connector under the action, set the Body of the request to {} using the "Import from sample" function

2. Once added to PA it was expecting an UnTypedObject so when calling the custom connector in PowerApps this is the syntax I used

Set(varBody,ParseJSON("MyJsonString"))

Set(varResponse,CustomConnectorName.Action({body:varBody}));

or if you have constructed a record or collection in PowerApps already that you need to convert to an UnTypedObject, Use the JSON() function nested inside the ParseJSON() function, like so:

Set(varBody,ParseJSON(JSON(varMyRecordOrCollection)))

Set(varResponse,CustomConnectorName.Action({body:varBody}));

[Rookie1]

Thank you this worked for me.