Publish Basic Web Files to Azure Blob Storage From a Teams Channel Form

[themsenduser]

OK, so in my previous posts I've shown ways to kick of Flows via metadata triggers, ways to create simple HTML files from Forms and publish them, today I'm going to show how to publish a basic readable file to Azure from a Form in a Teams Channel.

There are many reasons why an organization may want to build such a Flow, but in my opinion this is more helpful as a primer for your own ideas, as there are many ways to convert files via Flow (and I'll post some resources for other ideas at the end of this article). Making PDFs from HTML files, pulling the content from other Office files and generating HTML from them and updating existing HTML files then publishing them to Flow are all possibilities.

Publishing an HTML or other file to Azure blob storage can enable anyone who has the link to that specific file to access it and download it, which is a great way to provide much easier non-secure access to information than sharing that file directly from a One Drive or via SharePoint Online (as even a link that does not require authentication sometimes requires that user to have a Microsoft Online account).

In addition this could easily be used to create simple secure records in an unstructured data format outside of Office 365. You could also store these basic information files in a Database rather than BLOB storage for instance, to add some structure to the populated information.

So let's get started with this simple Flow!

First Step- Make Your Simple Form and Add It To Your Team Channel Tab.

OK! Good job. Now we'll head over to the Flow application and get started with the Forms Trigger "When a new response is submitted" and then choose the action go "Get Response Details"

Next, add another action.

This next action will be to create your BLOB, so select the Azure BLOB Storage-> Create BLOB option.

Flow will next ask you to establish a connection to the Azure BLOB storage container.

Using the Dynamic Data from the form responses, you can begin to populate your new file in the associated Azure BLOB storage container.

OK! That's about it for the Flow! Now, see below- I'm filling out my MS Form within my Teams Channel…

And when I click "Submit," my new file/BLOB pops up almost immediately within Azure!

When I visit the URL of the BLOB, here's what I get:

So that’s it for the main use case! I have a lot of things that are really good to know here at the end… so don't stop reading yet!

A lot of things that are really good to know here at the end.

1. If you use HTML, the format of the files created in Flow does not allow true HTML rendering- you will see your code, though it is possible to publish any proper HTML file you make via Azure Blob Storage.
2. You can make an email notification to send with the published URL for the location of the BLOB using a combination of the file path and dynamic data, but create an HTML email and use the format <a href="https://yourazureblob.blob.core.windows.net/blobcontainer/[dynamicformdata].html">https://yourazureb...> because the link format is choppy as the "%20" does not automatically populate spaces with the dynamic form fill. Example: FileName is the Publish Time of the document in the screenshot below-

 3. If you really want to publish nice, publicly viewable webpages or convert files, check out the following:

 Convert HTML to PDF using Flow

This use case shows the same as above, but also has a script to convert docs to HTML

PowerShell Scripts to convert office docs

You can also create an HTML Table directly as an action via Flow.

I hope that this helps beginners dive into more learning and encourages them to try out new things with Flow, and for you heavy scripters, there should be tons of things Flowing through your mind to solve all sorts of hefty use cases!

Have a great week everyone!