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URL: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/netsuite-odata-microsoft-flow.rst

⇱ Automate Tasks in Power Automate Using the CData API Server

Automate Tasks in Power Automate Using the CData API Server

👁 Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Automate NetSuite actions in Microsoft Flow — sending emails, posting to social media, or syncing CRM and ERP.

Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) makes it easy to automate tasks that involve data from multiple systems, on premises or in the cloud. With the CData API Server, line-of-business users have a native way to create actions based on NetSuite triggers in Power Automate; the API Server makes it possible for SaaS applications like Power Automate to integrate seamlessly with NetSuite data through data access standards like Swagger and OData. This article shows how to use wizards in Power Automate and the API Server for NetSuite to create a trigger -- entities that match search criteria -- and send an email based on the results.

About NetSuite Data Integration

CData provides the easiest way to access and integrate live data from Oracle NetSuite. Customers use CData connectivity to:

  • Access all editions of NetSuite, including Standard, CRM, and OneWorld.
  • Connect with all versions of the SuiteTalk API (SOAP-based) and SuiteQL, which functions like SQL, enabling easier data querying and manipulation.
  • Access predefined and custom reports through support for Saved Searches.
  • Securely authenticate with Token-based and OAuth 2.0, ensuring compatibility and security for all use cases.
  • Use SQL stored procedures to perform functional actions like uploading or downloading files, attaching or detaching records or relationships, retrieving roles, getting extra table or column info, getting job results, and more.

Customers use CData solutions to access live NetSuite data from their preferred analytics tools, Power BI and Excel. They also use CData's solutions to integrate their NetSuite data into comprehensive databases and data warehouse using CData Sync directly or leveraging CData's compatibility with other applications like Azure Data Factory. CData also helps Oracle NetSuite customers easily write apps that can pull data from and push data to NetSuite, allowing organizations to integrate data from other sources with NetSuite.

For more information about our Oracle NetSuite solutions, read our blog: Drivers in Focus Part 2: Replicating and Consolidating ... NetSuite Accounting Data.


Getting Started


Set Up the API Server

Follow the steps below to begin producing secure and Swagger-enabled NetSuite APIs:

Deploy

The API Server runs on your own server. On Windows, you can deploy using the stand-alone server or IIS. On a Java servlet container, drop in the API Server WAR file. See the help documentation for more information and how-tos.

The API Server is also easy to deploy on Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, and Heroku.

Connect to NetSuite

After you deploy, provide authentication values and other connection properties by clicking Settings -> Connections in the API Server administration console. You can then choose the entities you want to allow the API Server access to by clicking Settings -> Resources.

The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, must be set to valid NetSuite user credentials. In addition, the AccountId must be set to the ID of a company account that can be used by the specified User. The RoleId can be optionally specified to log in the user with limited permissions.

See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for more information on connecting to NetSuite.

You will also need to enable CORS and define the following sections on the Settings -> Server page. As an alternative, you can select the option to allow all domains without '*'.

  1. Access-Control-Allow-Origin: Set this to a value of '*' or specify the domains that are allowed to connect.
  2. Access-Control-Allow-Methods: Set this to a value of "GET,PUT,POST,OPTIONS".
  3. Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Set this to "x-ms-client-request-id, authorization, content-type".

Authorize API Server Users

After determining the OData services you want to produce, authorize users by clicking Settings -> Users. The API Server uses authtoken-based authentication and supports the major authentication schemes. You can authenticate as well as encrypt connections with SSL. Access can also be restricted by IP address; access is restricted to only the local machine by default.

For simplicity, we will allow the authtoken for API users to be passed in the URL. You will need to add a setting in the Application section of the settings.cfg file, located in the data directory. On Windows, this is the app_data subfolder in the application root. In the Java edition, the location of the data directory depends on your operation system:

  1. Windows: C:\ProgramData\CData
  2. Unix or Mac OS X: ~/cdata 
[Application]
AllowAuthtokenInURL = true

Add NetSuite Data to a Flow

You can use the built-in HTTP + Swagger connector to use a wizard to design a NetSuite process flow:

  1. In Power Automate, click My Flows -> Create from Blank.
  2. Select the Recurrence action and select a time interval for sending emails. This article uses 1 day.
  3. Add an HTTP + Swagger action by searching for Swagger.
  4. Enter the URL to the Swagger metadata document: 
    https://MySite:MyPort/api.rsc/@MyAuthtoken/$oas
  5. Select the "Return SalesOrder" operation.

  6. Build the OData query to retrieve NetSuite data. This article defines the following OData filter expression in the $filter box:

    Class_Name eq 'Furniture : Office'

    See the API Server help documentation for more on filtering and examples of the supported OData.

👁 The wizard to build the OData query. (Salesforce is shown.)

Trigger an Action

You can now work with SalesOrder entities in your process flow. Follow the steps to send an automated email:

  1. Add an SMTP - Send Email action.
  2. Enter the address and credentials for the SMTP server and name the connection. Be sure to enable encryption if supported by your server.
  3. Enter the message headers and body. You can add NetSuite columns in these boxes. 👁 An email to be populated with results from an OData query. (Salesforce is shown.)