How to Generate Content using MS Power Automate

[ValiLey]

There are multiple reasons to automate content creation and as a non-developer in a company that uses a lot of Microsoft products, I always found Power Automate workflows to be suitable for most automation use cases - this now includes creating (some) content for our documentation.

I recently ran into a situation where colleagues who are not familiar with static site generators, markdown or GitHub wanted to contribute content to the "Latest News" section of our documentation (see screenshot). After some consideration, I decided to create a process that makes it as simple as possible for them to contribute using the tools they are already used to: in this case Microsoft SharePoint.

The idea is simple:

• someone adds or modifies content in a SharePoint list
• this triggers a Power Automate workflow
• the workflow reads the content of the SharePoint list
• the content is arranged with some markdown syntax in a string variable
• the new content is written to a markdown file in the repository of our MkDocs project
• this then triggers a gitHub workflow that publishes the new content to our website

And believe it or not, this actually works 🥳
The main hurdle was how to save the new markdown file in the repository, but luckily I was able to follow the instructions in Jan Vidar Elven's How to Send Requests to GitHub API from Power Platform using Custom Connector to create an OAuth Application for the Github API and a Power Automate Custom Connector for said OAuth Application.

I also documented my approach for the newsfeed here in case anyone is interested or wants to do something similar 😄.