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Common scenarios, examples, tutorials, and walkthroughs for Azure Logic Apps

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Azure Logic Apps helps you orchestrate and integrate different services by providing hundreds of prebuilt and ready-to-use connectors, ranging from SQL Server and SAP to Azure AI services. Azure Logic Apps is "serverless", so you don't have to worry about scale or instances. All you have to do is define a workflow with a trigger and the actions that the workflow performs. The underlying platform handles scale, availability, and performance. Azure Logic Apps is especially useful for use cases and scenarios where you need to coordinate actions across multiple systems and services.

To help you learn about the capabilities and patterns that Azure Logic Apps supports, this guide describes common starting points, examples, and scenarios.

Common starting points for logic app workflows

Every workflow starts with a single trigger, which fires when the trigger condition is met, runs the workflow, and passes along any trigger outputs to subsequent actions in the workflow. Many connectors provide triggers, which have either of the following types:

  • Polling trigger: Checks a service endpoint for data or an event that meets the trigger condition, based on the specified schedule. If the trigger condition is met at that time, the trigger fires, creating and running a new workflow instance that uses any trigger outputs as inputs for the workflow.

  • Push trigger: Listens and waits at a service endpoint for data or an event that meets the trigger condition. At that time, the trigger fires immediately, creating and running a new workflow instance that uses any trigger outputs as inputs for the workflow.

Polling trigger examples

Trigger Description More information
Recurrence trigger Set the recurrence for running your workflow, including the start date and time. For example, you can select the days of the week and times of day. - Schedule and run recurring automated tasks, processes, and workflows with Azure Logic Apps

- Tutorial: Create automated, schedule-based recurring workflows by using Azure Logic Apps
When an email is received Check for new email from any mail provider that's supported by Azure Logic Apps, for example, Office 365 Outlook, Gmail, Outlook.com, and so on. Important: If you want to use the Gmail connector, only G-Suite business accounts can use this connector without restriction in Azure Logic Apps. If you have a Gmail consumer account, you can use this connector with only specific Google-approved services, or you can create a Google client app to use for authentication with your Gmail connector. For more information, see Data security and privacy policies for Google connectors in Azure Logic Apps.

For tutorials about email-related triggers, see the following documentation:

- Tutorial: Create automated approval-based workflows by using Azure Logic Apps

- Tutorial: Automate tasks to process emails by using Azure Logic Apps, Azure Functions, and Azure Storage
HTTP trigger Call a service endpoint over HTTP or HTTPS. Call, trigger, or nest workflows by using HTTP endpoints

Push trigger examples

Trigger Description
Request trigger Receive incoming HTTPS requests.
HTTP Webhook trigger Subscribe to a service endpoint by registering a callback URL with that service. That way, the service can just notify the trigger when the specified event happens, so that the trigger doesn't need to poll the service.

After you add the trigger, continue building your workflow by adding one or more actions. The following quickstarts help you build your first Consumption logic app workflow, which runs in global, multitenant Azure Logic Apps:

The following how-to guides help you build a Standard logic app workflow that runs in single-tenant Azure Logic Apps:

Control flow and error handling capabilities

Azure Logic Apps includes rich capabilities for advanced control flow, such as conditions, switches, loops, and scopes. To ensure resilient solutions, you can also implement error and exception handling in your workflows.

Create custom APIs and connectors

For systems and services that don't have published connectors, you can also extend Azure Logic Apps to create custom APIs and connectors:

Build business-to-business (B2B) solutions

For enterprise integration solutions and seamless communication between organizations, you can build automated scalable workflows for these scenarios by using the Enterprise Integration Pack (EIP) with Azure Logic Apps. Although organizations use different protocols and formats, they can exchange messages electronically. The EIP transforms different formats into a format that your organizations' systems can process and supports industry-standard protocols, including AS2, X12, EDIFACT, and RosettaNet. To build these solutions, you create an integration account, which is a separate Azure resource that provides a secure, scalable, and manageable container for the artifacts that you define and use with your logic app workflows. For example, artifacts include trading partners, agreements, maps, schemas, certificates, and batch configurations.

Access Azure virtual network resources

Sometimes, your logic app workflow might need access to secured resources, such as virtual machines (VMs) in an Azure virtual network. To directly access such resources, create a Standard logic app workflow. This type of logic app workflow runs in single-tenant Azure Logic Apps, separately from Consumption logic app workflows in multitenant Azure Logic Apps, and uses dedicated storage and other resources. With this option, you can reduce the impact that other Azure tenants might have on your apps' performance, which is also known as the "noisy neighbors" effect.

Deploy, manage, and monitor logic app workflows

You can fully develop and deploy logic app resources with Azure DevOps or any other source control and automated build tools. To support deployment for workflows and dependent connections in a resource template, logic app resources use Azure resource deployment templates. For notification and diagnostic logs for workflow run status, Azure Logic Apps also provides monitoring and alerts.

Deploy

Manage

Monitor

Handle content types, conversions, and transformations

You can access, convert, and transform multiple content types by using the many functions in the Azure Logic Apps workflow definition language. For example, you can convert between a string, JSON, and XML with the @json() and @xml() workflow expressions. Azure Logic Apps preserves content types to support content transfer in a lossless manner between services.

Other integrations and capabilities

Azure Logic Apps integrates with many services, such as Azure Functions, Azure API Management, Azure App Service, and custom HTTP endpoints, for example, REST and SOAP.

End-to-end scenarios

Customer stories

Learn how Azure Logic Apps, along with other Azure services and Microsoft products, helped these companies improve their agility and focus on their core businesses by simplifying, organizing, automating, and orchestrating complex processes.

Next steps