MS Power Automate/Flows
Microsoft Flow is a task automation tool that can help automate your day-to-day tasks and connect different applications and services. MS Flow is technically an integration Software as a Service (SaaS) that uses connectors to communicate with various applications, services, data, and devices in the cloud.
Connectors
A connector is a wrapper around an API that enables the underlying service to communicate with MS Flow, MS Power Apps, and Azure Logic Apps. Popular connectors include Salesforce, Office 365, Twitter, Google services, etc.
The Connector offers different operations like Actions and Triggers, and these can be easily leveraged within the Flows to perform additional functionality.
So, the question here is, what if someone is not able to find a Connector to meet their needs and requirements? The solution is to create a Connector and its components. In this article, we are going to show you how to make a connector and its relevant operations.
Pre-Requisite
There are several ways to create a connector, and we will show you how to create one using the Postman collection.
All you need is:
- A Postman collection using the API/Service which you want to connect with the Flow.
- Add the required actions in that collection, i.e., Get Token, Create List, etc.
- Now export the collection, as shown below:
- This collection contains all the required information, but you still need to add some information while creating the Connector.
We are going to show you how to create a connector for Marketo API. Marketo is a marketing automation application by Adobe. It is used to setup marketing automation campaigns and tasks for account-based marketing and other marketing services and products, including SEO and content creation.
You can explore more about the Marketo here.
So, you have Marketo API and its credentials. Now, you can create a connector.
Create a Connector
1. To create a connector, go to flow.microsoft.com and select the mentioned steps.
2. Add a name for the Connector and import the collection which you have exported in the above step.
3. Add the color if you want or leave that as it is. Add a description about the Connector so that others can understand what it does.
4. Once you add the details, click on the Security button to move to the next step, and select the No Authentication.
5. Click on the definition to move to the next step. Now you can see the information is already filled because we have already created requests in the Postman with the required details, including parameters and headers. You can add more Actions, Triggers, or Policies if you want, or you can also add the default response.
And see the Validation step to check if there are any errors or warnings.
6. After completing this step, you can click on the create connector button, and after creating the Connector, you can test this.
7. For testing, you can click on the test to open the window. In this, you have to create a connection by click on the New Connection button; after that, you have to add the required credentials in the GetAuthenticationToken tab; this is the request you had created in the Postman collection. Click on the Test Operation button to test.
You can now see we have created a custom connector for Marketo and successfully gotten the authentication token and its relevant values. You can use this connection for other operations that are exposed to the API like, adding an action of creating List in Marketo, Get Leads, Sync Leads, etc.
I hope this blog has proved to be a useful read for all of you. If you have any questions or queries, please leave a comment below. We will be happy to help!
Happy connecting!
