In part 1 we crated a Flow to enable/disable the sending of push notifications and in part 2 we created an Azure Function to generate random phrases of positivity.

In this third and final part of this series we’ll go and create the second Flow that sends the push notifications to the phone.

This Flow will be automatically triggered every 15 minutes by using a Recurrence action followed by an action to get the blob content containing whether or not we should send a notification as the following screenshot shows:

Now that we have the blob content, we can examine it in an If condition. If the content of the blob is “enabled” we can continue the Flow:

If the condition is satisfied (“IF YES”) two actions are  performed: the first an HTTP GET to the Azure function, the second a push notification action that as content uses what was returned in the body of the HTTP GET. Notice in the HTTP GET, the URI includes the function authorization key as a query string parameter.

After saving the new Flow, we can head back to the Flow app and hit the button to enable “positivity pushes”:

Then every 15 minutes (until we turn them off by hitting the button again) we’ll get a positivity notification on the phone:

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In part 1 we created a Flow to toggle the sending of push notifications on and off by storing the configuration in Azure blob storage.

Now that we have a way of enabling/disabling notifications we can start to build the second Flow.

Before jumping into the Flow designer, we need to consider how to generate random positivity phrases and how to integrate this into the second Flow. One option to do this is to create a simple Azure Function with an HTTP trigger. The Flow can then use an HTTP action to issue a GET to the server that will return the string content to be sent via push notifications.

In the Azure Portal function editor a new function can be created with a HTTP trigger configured to GET only as the following screenshot shows:

Notice in the preceding screenshot the authorization level has bee set to “function”. This means the key needs to be provided when the function is called.

We can now write some code in the function code editor window as follows:

using System.Net;

public static HttpResponseMessage Run(HttpRequestMessage req, TraceWriter log)
{
    log.Info("C# HTTP trigger function processed a request.");

    string phrase = GeneratePhrase();

    return req.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, phrase);
}

public static string  GeneratePhrase()
{
    var phrases = new string[]
    {
        "Don't worry, be happy :)",
        "All is well",
        "Will it matter in 100 years?",
        "Change what you can, don't worry about what you can't"
    };

    var rnd = new Random();
    
    return phrases[rnd.Next(phrases.Length)];
}

Clicking the Run button will test the function and we can see the random phrases being returned with a 200 status as shown in the following screenshot:

In the final part of  this series we’ll go and create the second Flow that uses this function and the configuration value created in the previous article to actually send random positivity push notifications on a 15 minute schedule.

To jump-start your Azure Functions knowledge check out my Azure Function Triggers Quick Start Pluralsight course.

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Microsoft Flow allows the creation of serverless cloud workflows. It is similar to services such as If This Then That and has more of a business focus. It allows custom Flows to integrate with Azure services such as blob storage, the calling of arbitrary HTTP services, in addition to a whole host of services such as Facebook, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.

In addition to executing in the cloud, Flows can create push notification to the Flow app on iOS and Android.

Once installed, the Flow app can be used to design/edit Flows, view Flow activity/recent executions, and initiate the execution of flows via “buttons” as shown in the following screenshot.

Tapping this software button will trigger the Flow in the cloud.

Example Scenario

To see buttons and push notification in action, imagine a scenario where sometimes you want cheering up with regular messages of positivity.

In this scenario, when enabled, you’ll get a push notification on your phone every 15 minutes with a random positive phase such as “Don't worry, be happy :)”.

To accomplish this two separate (but related) Flows can be created. The first Flow uses a button in the phone Flow app to toggle wether the “positivity pushes” will be sent. The second Flow is triggered automatically every 15 minutes and if enabled, sends a push notification.

Creating the Toggle Positivity Push Flow

This Flow will enable/disable the push notifications. To do this, a manual button trigger will be added to the Flow that will be pushed on the phone. To hold the enabled/disabled state, we can use the content of a blob in Azure blob storage. When triggered, the Flow will retrieve the content of the blob which can be the string “enabled” or “disabled”.

Once the blob content has been retrieved, its content can be examined in a If condition. If the content of the blob is currently “enabled” it will be updated to “disabled” and vice versa. Finally we’ll send a push notification to confirm the state.

Pressing the button in the app a couple of times results in the expected push notifications:

The blob content also gets toggled as expected:

In part 2 of this series we’ll start the process of creating another Flow to actually send the random positivity phrases to the phone.

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