Clarifying Power Apps Push Notifications via Power Automate Flows

Sean Roque, 28 November 2019

Power Automate provides us with a connector that allows for sending Push Notifications to your Canvas Power App. Most of the details can be found here.

Here are a few of our findings while implementing this Power Automate functionality.

The link above mentions that a known limitation of the Push Notification action is that it can only send the notification to one recipient at a time. A way around this is using a Flow to send to multiple recipients by clicking ‘Add new item’ each time a new recipient is to be added.

You may have noticed that the we are passing Email values to the Recipient fields, while the Documentation linked earlier attempts to pass in a unique identifier. When we had attempted to do the same it returned an error, causing us to look for an alternative method.

Each new recipient field should now be populated only with a single email address string.

Note that the email address must be the Primary Email of a valid User in the Directory where your Power App resides, otherwise it will return an error as well.

When the trigger for your Flow provides you with only unique identifiers for User lookup fields, you can easily pass them to the Recipient field by first implementing a Get Record action and passing the ID in the Item Identifier field.

Now simply reference the User record’s Primary Email field

As mentioned in the Documentation linked earlier if you select ‘Yes’ for Open App, you can pass the Power App parameters from your Flow trigger and reference it via Param(“VariableName”). Most notably, you can send GUID in text format and convert it into a GUID in the Power App, to specify the loaded item.

Power Automate Flow Push notification is an extremely useful function that can help our application evolve from a functional, to an impactful one. This blog clarified some of the issues that you may or may not encounter in your implementation. With that sorted, we can enjoy another powerful tool at our disposal!