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Automate Tasks in Power Automate Using the CData API Server
Automate actions like sending emails to a contact list, posting to social media, or syncing CRM and ERP.
Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) makes it easy to automate tasks that involve data from multiple systems, on premises or in the cloud. With the CData API Server, line-of-business users have a native way to create actions based on Smartsheet triggers in Power Automate; the API Server makes it possible for SaaS applications like Power Automate to integrate seamlessly with Smartsheet data through data access standards like Swagger and OData. This article shows how to use wizards in Power Automate and the API Server for Smartsheet to create a trigger -- entities that match search criteria -- and send an email based on the results.
About Smartsheet Data Integration
CData provides the easiest way to access and integrate live data from Smartsheet. Customers use CData connectivity to:
- Read and write attachments, columns, comments and discussions.
- View the data in individuals cells, report on cell history, and more.
- Perform Smartsheet-specific actions like deleting or downloading attachments, creating, copying, deleting, or moving sheets, and moving or copying rows to another sheet.
Users frequently integrate Smartsheet with analytics tools such as Tableau, Crystal Reports, and Excel. Others leverage our tools to replicate Smartsheet data to databases or data warehouses.
Getting Started
Set Up the API Server
Follow the steps below to begin producing secure and Swagger-enabled Smartsheet APIs:
Deploy
The API Server runs on your own server. On Windows, you can deploy using the stand-alone server or IIS. On a Java servlet container, drop in the API Server WAR file. See the help documentation for more information and how-tos.
The API Server is also easy to deploy on Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, and Heroku.
Connect to Smartsheet
After you deploy, provide authentication values and other connection properties by clicking Settings -> Connections in the API Server administration console. You can then choose the entities you want to allow the API Server access to by clicking Settings -> Resources.
Smartsheet uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, register an app to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL connection properties.
However, for testing purposes you can instead use the Personal Access Token you get when you create an application; set this to the OAuthAccessToken connection property.
You will also need to enable CORS and define the following sections on the Settings -> Server page. As an alternative, you can select the option to allow all domains without '*'.
- Access-Control-Allow-Origin: Set this to a value of '*' or specify the domains that are allowed to connect.
- Access-Control-Allow-Methods: Set this to a value of "GET,PUT,POST,OPTIONS".
- Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Set this to "x-ms-client-request-id, authorization, content-type".
Authorize API Server Users
After determining the OData services you want to produce, authorize users by clicking Settings -> Users. The API Server uses authtoken-based authentication and supports the major authentication schemes. You can authenticate as well as encrypt connections with SSL. Access can also be restricted by IP address; access is restricted to only the local machine by default.
For simplicity, we will allow the authtoken for API users to be passed in the URL. You will need to add a setting in the Application section of the settings.cfg file, located in the data directory. On Windows, this is the app_data subfolder in the application root. In the Java edition, the location of the data directory depends on your operation system:
- Windows: C:\ProgramData\CData
- Unix or Mac OS X: ~/cdata
[Application]
AllowAuthtokenInURL = true
Add Smartsheet Data to a Flow
You can use the built-in HTTP + Swagger connector to use a wizard to design a Smartsheet process flow:
- In Power Automate, click My Flows -> Create from Blank.
- Select the Recurrence action and select a time interval for sending emails. This article uses 1 day.
- Add an HTTP + Swagger action by searching for Swagger.
- Enter the URL to the Swagger metadata document:
https://MySite:MyPort/api.rsc/@MyAuthtoken/$oas - Select the "Return Sheet_Event_Plan_Budget" operation.
Build the OData query to retrieve Smartsheet data. This article defines the following OData filter expression in the $filter box:
Assigned eq 'Ana Trujilo'
See the API Server help documentation for more on filtering and examples of the supported OData.
Trigger an Action
You can now work with Sheet_Event_Plan_Budget entities in your process flow. Follow the steps to send an automated email:
- Add an SMTP - Send Email action.
- Enter the address and credentials for the SMTP server and name the connection. Be sure to enable encryption if supported by your server.
- Enter the message headers and body. You can add Smartsheet columns in these boxes.
