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Microsoft Power Platform is a system that enables users to build end to end business solutions through three key actions – Analyze, Act and Automate. It gain insights by analyzing data through Power BI, build solutions using Power Apps, and automate business processes through Power Automate. Microsoft Power Platform has the ability to leverage data from different data sources through data connectors.
Connector is an interface to connect to API that allows the underlying services to talk to Microsoft Power Platform. Some of the popular connectors includes Salesforce, Office 365, Twitter, Dropbox, SharePoint, SQL Server. Connectors enables you to connect to apps, data and devices in the cloud. Connectors allows your app to connect to underlying data sources. There are two types of data-sources: Tabular and action-based. Tabular data source is the one that returns data in a structured table format. Examples of Tabular data source includes Microsoft Dataverse, SharePoint and SQL server. An action-based data source is the one that uses functions to interact with data sources. It is also known as function-based data source. Examples includes Office 365 Users, Azure Blob Storage and Project Online. Both of these data sources are commonly used to bring data across many platforms and additional functionality to your solution.
There are more than 275 connectors available within Power Platform. Connectors are divided into three categories within Power Platform – Standard Connectors, Premium Connectors and Custom Connectors.
Standard Connectors – Power Platform provides Standard Connectors for many commonly used data sources. Some popular standard connectors are SharePoint, OneDrive, YouTube and Outlook. It is included with Power Apps per app plan and per user plan. For list of standard connectors, click here
Premium Connectors – Premium Connectors require additional licensing for your app and/or users. Some of the Premium Connectors are SQL Server, Mail Champ, Azure Key Vault. Premium connectors enable your app to connect to external applications such as Salesforce, DocuSign, Survey Monkey and so on. For list of Premium Connectors, click here.
Custom Connectors – While Microsoft offers to choose from hundreds of available data sources through Standard Connectors and Premium Connectors, you also have the option to build a custom connector. Creating a custom connector enables your app to extend its capabilities by calling publicly available API, or a custom API you are hosting in a cloud provider, such as Azure. Custom connectors are function-based, they call a specific function in the underlying service of the API to return the corresponding data.
Custom Connectors can be used in different platform such as Power Apps, Power Automate, and Azure Logic Apps.
Custom Connector can be created through 3 different ways:
- Using a blank custom connector
- From an OpenAPI definition
- From a Postman collection.
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