SOLUTIONS FOR POWER PLATFORM

Building a Power Platform Independent Publisher Connector for the Ethereum Blockchain (Part 3)

This article is the last part of a three-part series on building and submitting a custom connector through the official certification process.

Photo by Nikola Johnny Mirkovic on Unsplash

TL;DR — Part 3 is all about the usage of your connector once certified. We learn about the Power Platform UX for connectors and how to leverage the connector in Power Automate flows, Power Apps apps, and Power Virtual Agents Chatbots.

In Part 2 of this series on building and publishing an independent publisher connector for the Power Platform, we learned how we could submit and certify our customer connector.

As we learned in part two of this series, there are three types of connectors:

• Custom Connectors
• Independent Publisher Connectors
• Certified Connectors

Depending on which path you follow, the Power Platform will offer you different options to work with your connector.

Custom Connector

Custom Connectors are essentially sample connectors that you can import, use and extend in your Power Platform environment. Custom connectors can be imported from the custom connector page. Go to your Power Automate or Power Apps portal, uncollapse Data and click Custom connectors. In the upper right corner, you can click + New custom connector with the option to Import from Github.

You can search for custom connectors from the dev and master branches of the official repository and import the connector into your environment.

Bonus: One of the benefits of certified connectors over independent publisher connectors is the ability to import the connector directly from Github. It’s not yet clear why this isn’t an option for independent publisher connectors, and we might also see this option in the future.

Certified and Independent Publisher Connectors

The great thing with both connectors is the native ‘look & feel’ inside the Power Platform. You can search for your connectors in most places, and it will show up just like that.

For instance, if you search for Infura Ethereum inside a Power Automate flow, it will show you all available actions, just as they were native actions.

Connector usage

Typically, you build a connector for a single reason: To address your use case. After the logic is available in the platform, you will be spoiled for choosing to implement your use case in a Power Automate Flow, a Power Apps App, or a conversation in Power Virtual Agents. In any case, connectors are available in all three products.

Power Automate

As we already saw above, your connector’s action will show up in any Power Automate Flow. E.g., you could use the Infura Ethereum connector to send you a daily report containing your Eth balance, the current block number, and the current gas price as a daily digest mail.

Power Apps

You don’t have to use connectors through a Power Automate flow. Instead, connectors can be used natively in Power Apps. For instance, one could try building a MetaMask clone (let’s call it PowerMask 😉) in Power Apps and use the Infura Ethereum connector to invoke the action on the Ethereum blockchain.

You can add the connector from the Data tab in Power Apps. Click + Add data and search for your connector.

After the connector is added to your app, you can use it in Power Fx formulas just like this:

Power Virtual Agents

A more creative and progressive way to use your connector is through Chatbots. With Power Virtual Agents, you can build chatbots for your employees and publish them in Microsoft Teams, among other channels. In addition, Power Virtual Agents can be linked with Power Automate to invoke flows and present the result to the user in a meaningful conversation.

Let’s say we want to build a chatbot in Teams that allows for a quick check on the current transaction gas price on the Ethereum blockchain. For example, a user could ask the bot, “what’s the current gas price?” and get the transaction costs returned.

Building a chatbot and using the connector is very simple: Model your dialog in Power Virtual Agents, create a new Power Automate Flow from the designer and return its output to the dialog flow. That’s it.

Summary

In this final part of the series, we learned how the different connector types show up in the Power Platform and how simple it is to use connectors inside Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power Virtual Agents. Here are my key takeaways:

• Connectors appear natively in the platform or can be imported directly from Github as samples or for extension
• Connectors natively work in Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power Virtual Agents
• Consider using the Connector in Power Apps directly, without invoking it through a Power Automate flow
• Paring a Power Virtual Agents Chatbot with your connector brings pro-active and meaningful conversation for your employees.

Hopefully, my journey encourages you to build and submit your own connector to make the Power Platform even more powerful.

Make it so 👉
— Sebastian

Building a Power Platform Independent Publisher Connector for the Ethereum Blockchain (Part 1)

Building a Power Platform Independent Publisher Connector for the Ethereum Blockchain (Part 2)