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URL: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/odata-cloud-power-automate.rst

⇱ Integrate OData Services into Automated Tasks with Power Automate

Integrate OData Services into Automated Tasks with Power Automate

👁 Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Use CData Connect AI to connect to OData services and integrate live OData services into your Power Automate tasks.

Microsoft Power Automate is an online service that automates events (known as workflows) across the most common apps and services. When paired with CData Connect AI, you get instant, cloud-to-cloud access to OData services for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to connect to Connect AI from Power Automate and integrate live OData services into your workflows and tasks.

CData Connect AI provides a pure SQL, cloud-to-cloud interface for OData, allowing you to easily integrate with live OData services in Power Automate — without replicating the data. CData Connect AI looks exactly like a SQL Server database to Power Automate and uses optimized data processing out of the box to push all supported SQL operations (filters, JOINs, etc) directly to OData, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return OData services.

About OData Data Integration

CData simplifies access and integration of live OData services data. Our customers leverage CData connectivity to:

  • Access OData versions 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0, working with legacy services and the latest features and capabilities.
  • Leverage advanced query options, including $filter, $select, and $expand, enhancing data retrieval from 3rd party tools.
  • Use Server-side execution of aggregation and grouping to minimize data transfer and boost performance.
  • Authenticate securely using a variety of schemes, including Azure AD, digest, negotiate, NTLM, OAuth, and more means secure authentication with every connection.
  • Use SQL stored procedures to manage OData service entities - listing, creating, and removing associations between entities.

Customers use CData's solutions to regularly integrate their OData services with preferred tools, such as Power BI, MicroStrategy, or Tableau, and to replicate data from OData services to their databases or data warehouses.


Getting Started


Configure OData Connectivity for Power Automate

Connectivity to OData from Power Automate is made possible through CData Connect AI. To work with OData services from Power Automate, we start by creating and configuring a OData connection.

  1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
    2. 👁 Adding a Connection
  2. Select "OData" from the Add Connection panel
    3. 👁 Selecting a data source
  3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to OData.

    The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, must be set to valid OData user credentials. In addition, specify a URL to a valid OData server organization root or OData services file.

    👁 Configuring a connection (Salesforce is shown)
  4. Click Save & Test
  5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add OData Connection page and update the User-based permissions. 👁 Updating permissions

Add a Personal Access Token

When connecting to Connect AI through the REST API, the OData API, or the Virtual SQL Server, a Personal Access Token (PAT) is used to authenticate the connection to Connect AI. It is best practice to create a separate PAT for each service to maintain granularity of access.

  1. Click on the Gear icon () at the top right of the Connect AI app to open the settings page.
  2. On the Settings page, go to the Access Tokens section and click Create PAT.
  3. Give the PAT a name and click Create. 👁 Creating a new PAT
  4. The personal access token is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy it and store it securely for future use.

With the connection configured and a PAT generated, you are ready to connect to OData services from Power Automate.

Connecting to CData Connect AI

To use Connect AI to integrate OData services into your Power Automate tasks, you need a new SQL Server connection:

  1. Log in to Power Automate
  2. Click Data -> Connections -> New connection
  3. Select SQL Server 👁 Creating a new SQL Server Connection
  4. In the connection wizard:

    • Choose to connect directly
    • Set SQL server name to tds.cdata.com,14333
    • Set SQL database name to the name of the OData connection (e.g. OData1)
    • Set Username to a Connect AI user (e.g. [email protected])
    • Set Password to the PAT for the above user
    • Click Create 👁 Connecting to Connect AI

Integrating OData Services into Power Automate Tasks

With the connection to Connect AI configured, you are ready to integrate live OData services into your Power Automate tasks.

  1. Log in to Power Automate
  2. Click My flows -> New flow and choose to create the flow from blank or template
  3. Add (or configure) a SQL Server action (like Get rows) and configure the action to connect to your Connect AI connection
  4. Select a Table to work with (from the drop-down menu) and configure any advanced options (like filters, orders, etc) 👁 Getting OData "Rows"
  5. Configure any actions to follow and test, then save the flow

SQL Access to OData Services from Cloud Applications

Now you have a direct connection to live OData services from Power Automate tasks. You can create more connections and workflows to drive business — all without replicating OData services.

To get SQL data access to hundreds of SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources directly from your cloud applications, sign up for a free trial of CData Connect AI.

Related Power Automate Articles

This article explains how to use CData Connect AI with Power Automate (Online). Check out our other articles for more ways to work with Power Automate Desktop: