Report Automation with Python and PyMsTeams

In this article, I’ll show how to create beautiful reports with pymsteams, a package to send requests to Microsoft Teams Webhooks. We’ll explore an end-to-end example with a Stock Market report example.

Create Team in MS Teams

First of all, we need a Team with channel where we can send information in an automated way:

Create Team in MS Teams

Define the team's name and description

Define name and description

By default, MS Teams creates the general channel. We’re going to use this channel to post the reports, but you can create a new channel and use it for this example.

Create connector in MS Teams

1. Go to connectors

2. Search for “Incoming Webhook” and click on “add”

Configure Incoming Webhook

3. Click on Configure the connector

4. Define the name and image of the connector. On a personal whim, I decided to create the image with bing create with the prompt: “Microsoft corporate bot with cyberpunk and epic cartoon style” and use the “msteams-webhook” name for the incoming webhook.

5. Click on Create and you’ll get an URL, save it, we’ll need it later. The URL should be similar to this one:

https://<your-org-domain>.webhook.office.com/webhookb2/1a0a9550-99bd-4ba1-a73f-c64832e636d9@daf7990e-8a3f-409c-9b76-2a5475098000/IncomingWebhook/ef2eac97e22445d4b6b73026d0aaced7/ced8b42e-8c9f-4895-a1f7-3fcd6ad42c55

You’ll see this in the team channel

Python Automation

Now, Imagine we want to generate a report with Stock Market daily information (Close price, price variation, and Traded volume). To keep the exercise simple we only include three stocks: “AAPL”, “MSFT”, and “TSLA”. First, we need to install the libraries pymsteams and pandas-datareader

pip install pymsteams pandas-datareader

Import python packages and define variables. We also import datetime python built-in package to make easier the date manipulation we do.

import pymsteams
from datetime import datetime
import pandas_datareader.data as web

WEBHOOK_NAME = "msteams-webhook"
WEBHOOK_URL = "https://<your-org-domain>.webhook.office.com/webhookb2/1a0a9550-99bd-4ba1-a73f-c64832e636d9@daf7990e-8a3f-409c-9b76-2a5475098000/IncomingWebhook/ef2eac97e22445d4b6b73026d0aaced7/ced8b42e-8c9f-4895-a1f7-3fcd6ad42c55"
SYMBOLS = ["AAPL", "MSFT", "TSLA"]

In order to create the report in python in one code snippet, I’ll explain first the steps:

1. Iterate each stock and get the data from Yahoo Finance and calculate the percentage variation on the close price.
2. Create the variables close_price , p_variation and volume .
3. Create the content by stock (we use markdown syntax to make look prettier the report)
4. Create the PyMsTeams section, adding an image from Flaticon
5. Create the stock_report as pymsteams connector card, with the Webhook URL we define above
6. Add content to the connector card, like title and text, and finally, we add the pymsteams sections stored in the report_sections python list
7. Send the report to the MS Teams channel

report_sections = []
for symbol in SYMBOLS:
    print(f"Preparing report for {symbol}")
    
    # Get stock information from yahoo finance
    data = web.get_data_yahoo(symbol,end=datetime.today())
    data["pct_change"] = data["Close"].pct_change()
    data = data.tail(1)
    
    # calculate report data
    variation = round(data['pct_change'][0], 4) * 100
    if variation < 0:
        p_variation = f'<span style="color:#D61355">{variation}%</span>'
    else:
        p_variation = f'<span style="color:#1F8A70">{variation}%</span>'
        
    close_price = f"${round(data['Close'][0], 4)}" 
    volume  = f"{round(data['Volume'][0], 4):,}" 

    # Prepare section content
    text_ = f"""
* **Stock Name**: {symbol}
* **Close price**: { close_price }
* **Price variation**: **{ p_variation }**
* **Volume**: { volume }
    """
    
    message_section = pymsteams.cardsection()
    message_section.activityTitle(symbol) # Define section title
    message_section.activityImage("https://cdn-icons-png.flaticon.com/512/10310/10310226.png")
    message_section.activityText(text_) # Insert markdown text
    report_sections.append(message_section)

stocks_report = pymsteams.connectorcard(hookurl=WEBHOOK_URL)
stocks_report.title(f"PYMSTEAMS AUTOMATED DAILY STOCK REPORT &#128480;")
stocks_report.text(f"""
Report automatically generated by `{WEBHOOK_NAME}`
* **Date**: { datetime.today().strftime('%Y-%m-%d') }
""")

for section in report_sections:
    stocks_report.addSection(section)

stocks_report.color("#0F6292")
stocks_report.send()

Another style decision I made was changing the color of the percentage change depending if it is positive (green)or negative (red) using some HTML code in the markdown text_ variable I created by stock.

The final daily report will look like this:

Stock Report in MS Teams Channel

And of course, You can expand the scope or content of the report by exploring the pymsteams library objects (or preparing HTTP requests directly, here Microsfot docs) and improving the style with more sophisticated markdown styles.