You probably don’t need to know that Spotify has an API, or any other service you use daily. The API documentations are usually hidden away from regular users. If you are interested to learn more, here is some further reading: Similarly, if you know how to work with one API, you can quite easily use any API.Īnd yes, these are awfully simplified explanations of an API, but it’s basically all you need to know for now. You don’t have to know what is going under the hood, you just need to know how to drive one. You drive all of them by using a steering wheel and pedals. API is like the waiter between the user and the system, sending information back and forth.Īnd here’s another analogy There are many different types of cars, but they all have something in common. One of the common ‘API for Dummies’ analogies is that it’s like a waiter in a restaurant You tell the waiter what you want to order, the waiter delivers the order to the kitchen and then, hopefully soon, you get your food. What is an API?ĪPI stands for “Application Programming Interface”. APIs expand the possibilities of Power Automate quite considerably, so knowing how to use one is a valuable skill for any citizen developer. There are plenty of connectors available in Power Automate for different Microsoft and third-party services.īut sometimes the connector you need doesn’t exist or it doesn’t have the correct actions available.

You don’t need to know anything about APIs.

Using HTTP actions in Power Automate requires either a trial license or, for example, Power Automate per User plan.

You should also know how to trigger a flow manually.

You should know how to build simple flows in Power Automate (basically you should know how to add triggers and actions and how to use dynamic content).

To get started, there are some prerequisites: In this blog post I’ll go through the basic terminology and give you a hands-on example of how to use an API with Power Automate. Have you heard people around you using the word “API” and wondered what it is? Maybe you have a vague idea, but you still don’t know what to do with one? You have come to the right place, my fellow citizen developer! “We need to pull information from this definitely-not-a-Microsoft-service, but don’t worry, there’s an API for that”.

Ariba rest api