SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

Next in my series of posts on using Microsoft Flow with Project Online is capturing Project Online data into a SharePoint list, this is a useful scenario for simple snapshot requirements. For example, if you want to snapshot some key project level data, the easiest place to store this data is in a SharePoint list. I have blogged simple code examples before that do this: https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2016/08/26/projectonline-data-capture-snapshot-capability-with-powershell-sharepoint-office365-ppm-bi/ & https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2018/01/27/projectonline-project-level-html-fields-to-a-sharepoint-list-powershell-ppm-office365/ Whilst these approaches work, the PowerShell does need to be run from somewhere, a server / Azure Function etc. This post provides the same end result with Project Online data in a SharePoint list but all from a Microsoft Flow. The Flow can be seen below:

This simple example makes use of the recurrence trigger to schedule the process, the “Send an HTTP Request to SharePoint” action to get the project data from Project Online and a SharePoint create item action inside an Apply to each loop. We will walkthrough the actions later in the post.

Firstly, the SharePoint list was created:

This was created in my Project Online Project Web App site collection. I created SharePoint columns on this list for each of the fields I wanted to capture from my Project Online dataset. As this is just an example, the number of fields and data is quite limited. Now back to the Flow. We will skip over the recurrence trigger to the first action that gets the Project Online data, this just uses the “Send an HTTP Request to SharePoint” action to call the Project Online OData REST API so that we can easily get all of the Project Online data. In this example we are accessing the Projects endpoint in this API and selecting a few example project level fields including an example custom field:

This action will get all of the data based on the Odata query used in the Uri input. We wont cover all of the settings here in this post as I covered this in the last post found here: https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2018/12/12/projectonline-publish-all-projects-using-msflow-microsoftflow-ppm-pmot-office365-powerplatform-part-2/

Next we need to loop through all of the projects in the results array to create a SharePoint list item for each project. To do this we need to use an “Apply to each” action:

In the output from the previous step we use body(‘ReadallProjects’)[‘value’] to use the data from the previous step which is all of our Project Online projects with some data minus the timesheet project in this example. Then for each project in the array we create a list item on our target SharePoint list using the create item action. In the create item action we just map the data from the array to the correct list column. The Project Online fields are accessed using an expression, for example for ProjectCost in this example Flow the expression is items(‘Apply_to_each’)[‘ProjectCost’] where apply to each is the name of the action and ProjectCost is the field / property in the results from the Odata query.

Once this Flow runs a few times you can then easily create snapshot / trend reports or even extend the SharePoint view to show what you need:

As you can see in this example, I’ve updated the SharePoint view to show the RAG icon in the Overall RAG column rather than the text value. This is very simple with the column formatting options available with the SharePoint modern UI using JSON.

Another example of extending Project Online with low / no code solutions in Office 365.

There will be further example solutions built for Project Online using Microsoft Flow in later posts.