Using built-in HTTP requests in Power Apps and Automate

Table of contents

General
Power Automate samples
Office 365 Users
Count all users in tenant
Order user response by displayName
Filter for users with department XYZ
Office 365 Groups
Filter all groups by displayName
Read all members of a group
Count all members of a group
Microsoft Teams
Send a plain message in a chat
Send an adaptive card in a chat
SharePoint Online
Power Apps samples
Read all members of a group

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TL;DR - Most things can be done using built-in actions in Power Automate and Apps. Here are examples where using the free HTTP requests makes sense and helps working with the returned data.

General

All actions that are send with these built-in actions are automatically delegated. This means, that the flow acts in your context and checks if you have permissions to read or write the data you requested. Consider the HTTP request actions as additional options, as you can do most things with the built in actions.

Here is an overview of the endpoints you can use:

Category	Endpoint Url	Links
Users	https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me 2nd segment: messages, mailFolders, events, calendar, calendars, outlook, inferenceClassification	https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/office365users/#send-an-http-request
Groups	https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups	https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/office365groups/#send-an-http-request-v2
Teams	https://graph.microsoft.com/v.1.0/teams https://graph.microsoft.com/v.1.0/me/chats https://graph.microsoft.com/v.1.0/users 2nd segment: channels, chats, installedApps, messages, pinnedMessages	https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/teams/?tabs=text1%2Cdotnet#send-a-microsoft-graph-http-request
Outlook	https://graph.microsoft.com/v.1.0/me https://graph.microsoft.com/v.1.0/users 2nd segment: messages,mailFolders,events,calendar,calendars,outlook,inferenceClassification	https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/office365/#send-an-http-request

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Currently, not all oData query parameters are supported. If you need the full range of parameters, you have to use the HTTP premium connector and the Graph API.

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Respect the limits for the Graph API and the respective service connector, for example Teams: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling-limits#microsoft-teams-service-limits or here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/teams

🚨

By default, all requests have a response limit of 100 items. If you want more, you can use top=999 to get up to 999 items. This is the max amount. Otherwise, you will have to process the odatanextlink to get more than 999 items.

Power Automate samples

For all requests where you use $orderby, $filter or $count, you have to to use a custom header (paste as is into the parameter)

ConsistencyLevel: eventual

Office 365 Users

Count all users in tenant

Method: GET
Content-Type: application/json
Custom Header 1: ConsistencyLevel: eventual
Uri:https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/$count

Order user response by displayName

Method: GET
Content-Type: application/json
Custom Header 1: ConsistencyLevel: eventual
Uri:https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users?$orderby=displayName

Filter for users with department XYZ

Also works for jobTitle

Does not work for location or company.

Method: GET
Content-Type: application/json
Custom Header 1: ConsistencyLevel: eventual
Uri: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users?$select=displayName,companyName,department,mail,id,jobTitle&$filter=Department eq 'IT'

Office 365 Groups

Filter all groups by displayName

Method: GET
Content-Type: application/json
Custom Header 1: ConsistencyLevel: eventual
Uri: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups?$filter=displayName eq 'SearchString'

Read all members of a group

Method: GET
Content-Type: application/json
Uri: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/Group-Id/members?$select=displayName,companyName,department,mail,id

Count all members of a group

Method: GET
Content-Type: application/json
Custom Header 1: ConsistencyLevel: eventual
Uri: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/group-id/members/$count

Microsoft Teams

Send a plain message in a chat

If you need to send a large number of messages in a short time, you should use this HTTP request as it has a throughput of 200 messages per second instead of 25 per 300 seconds with the built-in action (At least how I understand the documentation, though I have tested this with 500 message).

You can use the create chat built-in action to create a new chat, which will give you the conversation-id.

Method: POST
Content-Type: application/json
Uri: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/chats/CONVERSATION-ID/messages
Body:
{
  "body": {
     "content": "Hello world"
  }
}

Send an adaptive card in a chat

Adaptive cards can also be send via the graph API. If you have no images in your adaptive card, you can use the code below. If you do have images, you will have to place them as base64 into the hosted contents. You can use a compose action with the expression guid() to get a random GUID string. The number needs to be the same in the body/content and attachments/id.

I recommend using one compose action to set the adaptive card, then another compose action to escape the adaptive card JSON.

Method: POST
Content-Type: application/json
Uri: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/chats/CONVERSATION-ID/messages

Body: 
{
    "subject": null,
    "body": {
        "contentType": "html",
        "content": "<attachment id=\"GUID\"></attachment>"
    },
    "attachments": [{
        "id": "GUID",
        "contentType": "application/vnd.microsoft.card.adaptive",
        "contentUrl": null,
        "content": "ESCAPEDADAPTIVECARDJSON",
        "name": null,
        "thumbnailUrl": null
    }],
    "hostedContents": []
}

SharePoint Online

I have a lot of other blogs where I write about these features. For example:

HTTP request to SharePoint - Files and Items

HTTP request to SharePoint - Users, Groups and Permissions

HTTP Request for SharePoint - Site structure

Power Apps samples

You can obviously use built-in connectors for the respective connectors, the HTTP requests allow you to change specific things like selecting columns for the response.

Read all members of a group

Power Apps currently does not really understand the response of HTTP requests. Therefore, you have to basically parse the answer. You first have to set the result to variable and from there collect it into a collection.

You can only read a maximum of 999 members per group.

Set(
    grpMembers,
    Office365Groups.HttpRequestV2(
        "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/Group-Id/members?$select=displayName,companyName,department,mail,id&$top=999",
        "GET",
        "",
        //Technically the content type does not matter. It is not parsed in any way
        {ContentType: "application/json"}
    )
);
ClearCollect(
    colMembers,
    ForAll(
        Table(grpMembers.value),
        {
            DisplayName: Text(Value.displayName),
            Company:Text(Value.companyName),
            Department: Text(Value.department),
            Mail:Text(Value.mail),
            Id:Text(Value.id)
        }
    )
)

Thanks for reading! 💕