Flow Friday – Feeding news to MS Teams – Part 2

So… Apparently Flow is not Flow anymore 🙂 Flow is now called Power Automate but since the actual flows still are called flows I will keep the name Flow Friday…

Last week we startad posting news to Microsoft Teams… today we are expanding that concept… Same basic flow with a nice look and more news sources

Since we are not able to add multiple trigger to a Flow (yet?? *hoping*) and I am too lazy to build multiple flows… that would be cheating.

The multiple news sources requires a workaround using an external service called RSSUnify (there are other services that you can use). Go to RSSUnify and add all your feeds.

Then you copy the resulting RSS URL from RSSUnify and add it to Microsoft Flow

In order to refine the flow even more I want to make the Teams posting a little nicer. To do that I use the action “Post your own adaptive card as the flow bot to a channel (Preview)”. To design the look of the card you can either write your own JSON design or you can use this tool. I created a minimal card and the post information.

The card posting action has issues handling HTML which means that I will have to convert the summary into Plain Text. In order to fix this I add an action called Html to Text and then add the result to the adaptive card.

{
    "$schema": "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
    "type": "AdaptiveCard",
    "version": "1.0",
    "body": [
        {
            "type": "TextBlock",
            "text": "[@{triggerBody()?['title']}](@{triggerBody()?['primaryLink']})",
            "weight": "Bolder",
            "size": "Medium"
        },
        {
            "type": "ColumnSet",
            "columns": [
                {
                    "type": "Column",
                    "width": "stretch",
                    "items": [
                        {
                            "type": "TextBlock",
                            "spacing": "None",
                            "text": "@{body('Html_to_text')}",
                            "isSubtle": true,
                            "wrap": true
                        }
                    ]
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "type": "TextBlock",
            "text": "",
            "wrap": true
        }
    ]
}

The post looks like this:

That is it for this week

Links:
https://adaptivecards.io/
https://rssunify.com/

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