When your to-do-list fills up and your day gets busy up to the point that the work you do gets out of your Flow – you need more Power.
Coffee will help in some cases, but what really does the trick is dox42 working with Microsoft Flow and PowerApps. The integration of dox42 into Microsoft Flow and PowerApps is an easy way to automate your workday creating customized and beautifully designed documents like reports, contacts, presentations and many more automatically.
What can you expect in this blog?
In this blog you will learn how to create a custom connector for a third party webservice (dox42) in MS Flow and trigger the dox42 document creation from a PowerApp.
- Creating a dox42 REST URL using the dox42Server TestClient
- dox42Server Custom Connector in MS Flow
- MS PowerApp from a SharePoint list
- Trigger an MS Flow from a PowerApp
- Generate documents by pressing a button using dox42 in combination with Microsoft PowerApps and Flow
For this blog the above-mentioned points will be demonstrated creating a PowerPoint presentation. This works the same way with all kinds of documents like Word and Excel. Common dox42 customer scenarios include the creation of Orders, Invoices, Contracts, Certificates and many more.
The Real World
We at dox42 generate our presentations for our events with Flow/PowerApps. The design is done with the dox42 Office Add-Ins. For more information visit the dox42 website.
This is one of the many cases where we can create individual and visually appealing presentations on the fly, that are always there to be generated from our phones without the need to open our notebooks. We can show you how to build your own app with dox42, MS Flow and PowerApps.
This will be shown in six steps:
- Start – SharePoint List
- dox42Server TestClient – REST URL
- dox42Server Custom Connector
- PowerApp
- Flow our PowerApp
- The final UI touch
1. Start – SharePoint List
Everything starts, like most things in the life of a SharePoint User with a list, containing all the Items we need to make the presentation unique for an event.
2. dox42Server TestClient – REST URL
First, we need to upload our presentation template together with the DataMap onto our dox42 server or SharePoint to be accessible for the dox42 server. The generation of the document needs to be tested from our local machine via a REST call which can be done using our dox42 ServerTestClient:
Here we can specify all needed parameters so that the TestClient can create the REST URL to make the call to test the generation. This REST URL will now be needed to define the Custom Connector mentioned earlier.
3. dox42Server Custom Connector
Now we can make the Connector within MS Flow by going to “Custom Connectors” -> “Create custom connector” -> “Create from blank”.




4. PowerApp
Now that we have made the Custom Connector, it is time to play with PowerApps. In our case, the presentations are saved to SharePoint after the dox42Server has returned the newly generated document. To make this more appealing and user-friendly we use MS PowerApps where we can design the custom UI.





5. Flow our PowerApp
Now we have to make our Flow that will read all items in the list, generate the presentation that we select and then save to SharePoint.




6. The final UI touch


You can add, modify and trigger all presentations from your smartphone within only a few touches on the screen. Customize the PowerApps look to your needs.
For example, we created a dox42 custom design:
Winning the game
Developing custom solutions has traditionally been too costly and time consuming for many of the teams and departments, especially for those with projects that integrate multiple data sources. To solve this problem there is dox42, which shines together with Flow/PowerApps and allows a combination of various data sources such SQL, XML/JSON, CRM and many more. The result? People in departments from Sales to Marketing, from Operations to Finance now have the power to select and adopt tools to improve their document creation better than ever, with dox42.
To take your document game on another level, visit dox42.com or contact us via info@dox42.com for a personal Demo or Web Meeting to help you!