Creating a Custom Connector for Power Apps

Introduction

Power Automate has become a key part of the power platform. Power Automate is a strong, built-in workflow engine that is meant to quickly automate workflows along with securely connecting on-premise data and cloud-based services ensuring that you can make most of your existing data. With Microsoft’s decision to shift from the classic workflows in Dynamics 365 CE, the use of Power Automate has become even more imperative. The Power Automate platform provides users with multiple connectors “APIs” that allow you to communicate and connect with the disparate systems / applications without coding.  However, not all connectors fit in the versatile business needs.

In this blog, we will be explaining how a user can create a custom connector to meet his/her business needs.

Creating a Custom Connector:

1. Navigate to make.powerapps.com
2. Choose your environment
3. Expand Data
4. Click on Custom Connectors
5. Press New Custom Connector
6. Press Create from Blank

7. A pop-up will appear. Enter the name of the custom connector, for example, Exchange Rate
8. The PowerApps platform displays the custom connector wizard, provide the connector details as shown below
   • Exchange Rate: this is the name of the connector
   • Host: the API host URL used to get the exchange rates

9. Click on Security and select No Authentication
10. Click on Definition and Press New action
11. Enter the Summary of the action and the Operation ID

12. Under the Request section, click on Import from Sample

13. Select the Verb as Get
14. Enter the URL, the URL contains two parameters, base and symbols.
15. To update the parameter values, click on the parameter under the query section in the request and then select Edit

16. Type USD in the default value and select Is required as Yes

17. Make sure the validation section is succeeded
18. Click on Create Connector
19. Click on Test
20. Press New Connection
21. Provide the currency exchange rate you would like to get
22. Press Test Operation
23. The request will now send back a response, as shown in the image below:

24. Click on Close and now you have your connector created where you could use it in a PowerApps platform

Conclusion

The Power Automate platform gives users an unprecedented way of automating business processes without the need to have coding knowledge. The platform gives the user the ability to create powerful workflows and connect to external systems like never before.

In this blog, we explained to you how you can formulate your custom connector for Power Apps through a series of steps. If you have any confusion, questions or insights, leave a comment below! We will get back to you!