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

4 minutes to read Contributors
  • Jeff Hollan
  • Esther Fan
  • Mandi Ohlinger

Azure Logic Apps helps you orchestrate and integrate different services by providing 100+ ready-to-use connectors, ranging from on-premises SQL Server or SAP to Microsoft Cognitive Services. The Logic Apps service is "serverless", so you don't have to worry about scale or instances. All you have to do is define the workflow with a trigger and the actions that the workflow performs. The underlying platform handles scale, availability, and performance. Logic Apps is especially useful for use cases and scenarios where you need to coordinate multiple actions across multiple systems.

To help you learn more about the many patterns and capabilities that Azure Logic Apps supports, here are common examples and scenarios.

Every logic app starts with a trigger, and only one trigger, which starts your logic app workflow and passes in any data as part of that trigger. Some connectors provide triggers, which come in these types:

  • Polling triggers: Regularly checks a service endpoint for new data. When new data exists, the trigger creates and runs a new workflow instance with the data as input.

  • Push triggers: Listens for data at a service endpoint and waits until a specific event happens. When the event happens, the trigger fires immediately, creating and running a new workflow instance that uses any available data as input.

Here are just a few popular trigger examples:

  • Polling:

    • Schedule - Recurrence trigger lets you set the start date and time plus the recurrence for firing your logic app. For example, you can select the days of the week and times of day for triggering your logic app.

    • The "When an email is received" trigger lets your logic app check for new email from any mail provider that's supported by Logic Apps, for example, Office 365 Outlook, Gmail, Outlook.com, and so on.

    • The HTTP trigger lets your logic app check a specified service endpoint by communicating over HTTP.

  • Push:

    • The Request / Response - Request trigger lets your logic app receive HTTP requests and respond in real time to events in some way.

    • The HTTP Webhook trigger subscribes 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 receiving a notification about new data or an event, the trigger fires, creates a new logic app workflow instance, and runs the actions in the workflow. You can access any data from the trigger throughout the workflow. For example, the "On a new tweet" trigger passes the tweet content into the logic app run.

Respond to triggers and extend actions

For systems and services that might not have published connectors, you can also extend logic apps.

Control flow, error handling, and logging capabilities

Logic apps include rich capabilities for advanced control flow, like conditions, switches, loops, and scopes. To ensure resilient solutions, you can also implement error and exception handling in your workflows. For notification and diagnostic logs for workflow run status, Azure Logic Apps also provides monitoring and alerts.

Deploy and manage logic apps

You can fully develop and deploy logic apps with Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, or any other source control and automated build tools. To support deployment for workflows and dependent connections in a resource template, logic apps use Azure resource deployment templates. Visual Studio tools automatically generate these templates, which you can check in to source control for versioning.

Content types, conversions, and transformations within a run

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. The Logic Apps engine preserves content types to support content transfer in a lossless manner between services.

Other integrations and capabilities

Logic apps also offer integration with many services, like Azure Functions, Azure API Management, Azure App Services, and custom HTTP endpoints, for example, REST and SOAP.

End-to-end scenarios

Next steps