Figured I would share the first proof of concept for the Microsoft Teams bot that I am working on. I absolutely love finding new ways to use REST connections to help my company visualize Epicor in more meaningful ways.
Quick breakdown of how this works:
I created a BAQ that unioned job prod, job mtl, and job op together for a selected job. Then created a Power Virtual agent bot that when prompted takes the job number of your choosing and feeds it into a Microsoft Flow. The Microsoft Flow puts together the REST url to pull the BAQ data then i parses the returned JSON into an HTML table. The flow then outputs the HTML code back to the bot, and Teams interprets the HTML and outputs a readable table.
(ignore the outrageous typo where the guy at the saw produced 722,292 parts)
Cool. I haven’t used Eva much at all. I have yet to have a use case that presented itself necessary. Same reason i didn’t invest any time into a Team bot or even the Alexa integration you created a few years ago. Fun to play around with but i don’t think anyone would use it, at least with the company i am with.
Both Power Virtual Agent, and Microsoft Flow are low/no code environments, so within 15-30 minutes I was able to get it to take an input, grab REST data, and spit out a basic output. Then I struggled for several hours trying to get a decent looking output until I found out Teams could interpret raw HTML at Chat time. Then I was able to use this article: Power Automate HTML Table Styling – Ryan Maclean to get a nice table.
I hit a hard dead end trying to get Microsoft’s Adaptive Cards to work. This is where being inside of a low/no code environment get’s frustrating because it tries to do error correction for you, and in the case of making an adaptive card with a collection of values it assumes that you want to loop through the collection despite the adaptive card just looking for the raw array.
