Microsoft Graph

Calling Microsoft Graph from your Teams application – Part 4: Bots

~ Bob German ~ Leave a comment

Microsoft Teams applications almost always need to call the Graph API, yet it’s not as easy as just calling a REST service. Most of the complexity has to do with getting an Azure AD access token, which is required on every Graph call to establish what, if anything, the caller is authorized to do.

Getting the access token requires an understanding of Teams, Azure AD, Graph, and sometimes other components like the SharePoint Framework or Bot Framework, yet each of these is documented separately and each one assumes the reader knows all the others. I literally get questions every day from frustrated developers trying to figure this out! (Yesterday I got 3!) In 2 1/2 years of Teams app development, this by far the most common source of difficulties.

I wrote these articles hoping they’ll assist developers in calling the Graph from Microsoft Teams. They’re also companions for my talk, “Calling Microsoft Graph from your Teams Application”, at the PnP Virtual Conference 2020.

  1. Introduction
  2. Deep dive concepts (optional)
  3. Calling Graph from a Teams tab
  4. Calling Graph from a Teams bot (this article)

This article will explain the options for building bots for Microsoft Teams which directly call the Microsoft Graph. Two options are considered, however it will be easier to decide because there’s really only one choice per scenario.

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Calling Microsoft Graph from your Teams Application – Part 3: Tabs

~ Bob German ~ 3 Comments

Microsoft Teams applications almost always need to call the Graph API, yet it’s not as easy as just calling a REST service. Most of the complexity has to do with getting an Azure AD access token, which is required on every Graph call to establish what, if anything, the caller is authorized to do.

Getting the access token requires an understanding of Teams, Azure AD, Graph, and sometimes other components like the SharePoint Framework or Bot Framework, yet each of these is documented separately and each one assumes the reader knows all the others. I literally get questions every day from frustrated developers trying to figure this out! (Yesterday I got 3!) In 2 1/2 years of Teams app development, this by far the most common source of difficulties.

I wrote these articles hoping they’ll assist developers in calling the Graph from Microsoft Teams. They’re also companions for my talk, “Calling Microsoft Graph from your Teams Application”, at the PnP Virtual Conference 2020.

  1. Introduction
  2. Deep dive concepts (optional)
  3. Calling Graph from a Teams tab (this article)
  4. Calling Graph from a Teams bot

This article will explain the options for building tabs for Microsoft Teams which directly call the Microsoft Graph. The same methods apply to Task Modules (modal dialog boxes).

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Calling Microsoft Graph from your Teams application – Part 2: Deep Dive

~ Bob German ~ Leave a comment

Microsoft Teams applications almost always need to call the Graph API, yet it’s not as easy as just calling a REST service. Most of the complexity has to do with getting an Azure AD access token, which is required on every Graph call to establish what, if anything, the caller is authorized to do.

Getting the access token requires an understanding of Teams, Azure AD, Graph, and sometimes other components like the SharePoint Framework or Bot Framework, yet each of these is documented separately and each one assumes the reader knows all the others. I literally get questions every day from frustrated developers trying to figure this out! (Yesterday I got 3!) In 2 1/2 years of Teams app development, this by far the most common source of difficulties.

I wrote these articles hoping they’ll assist developers in calling the Graph from Microsoft Teams. They’re also companions for my talk, “Calling Microsoft Graph from your Teams Application”, at the PnP Virtual Conference 2020.

  1. Introduction
  2. Deep dive concepts (optional – this article)
  3. Calling Graph from a Teams tab
  4. Calling Graph from a Teams bot

The first article is intended to explain the basics which anyone should understand before embarking on a Teams project that will call Microsoft Graph. This article is an optional deep dive that will go into more detail, either for the curious or to help in troubleshooting. The articles which follow target specific scenarios, such as calling the Graph from a tab or bot in Teams.

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Calling Microsoft Graph from your Teams application – Part 1: Introduction

~ Bob German ~ 2 Comments

Microsoft Teams applications almost always need to call the Graph API, yet it’s not as easy as just calling a REST service. Most of the complexity has to do with getting an Azure AD access token, which is required on every Graph call to establish what, if anything, the caller is authorized to do.

Getting the access token requires an understanding of Teams, Azure AD, Graph, and sometimes other components like the SharePoint Framework or Bot Framework, yet each of these is documented separately and each one assumes the reader knows all the others. I literally get questions every day from frustrated developers trying to figure this out! (Yesterday I got 3!) In 2 1/2 years of Teams app development, this by far the most common source of difficulties.

I wrote these articles hoping they’ll assist developers in calling the Graph from Microsoft Teams. They’re also companions for my talk, “Calling Microsoft Graph from your Teams Application”, at the PnP Virtual Conference 2020.

  1. Introduction (this article)
  2. Deep dive concepts (optional)
  3. Calling Graph from a Teams tab
  4. Calling Graph from a Teams bot

This article will explain the basics. If all goes well, you can follow the step-by-step instructions in one of the sample apps and be done with it! Some day, the tooling may be improved to automate some of the steps.

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Provisioning Teams with Azure Functions and Microsoft Flow Part 5: A Change in Direction

~ Bob German ~ 1 Comment

It’s only been a few weeks since I published the 4-part blog series on Teams provisioning, and already I’ve learned a lot. So here is part 5 of the 4-part series, which will explore early learning and begin to discuss future directions for the project.

  1. Solution Overview
  2. Installing the solution
  3. Building a Flow for the solution
  4. Looking at the code
  5. A Change in Direction (this post)

ALSO – the code has moved to an official PnP repository! Please update your links accordingly.

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Provisioning Teams with Azure Functions and Microsoft Flow Part 3: Writing the Flow

~ Bob German ~ 6 Comments

This is part of a blog series explaining a new open source solution (located here) for provisioning Microsoft Teams. The solution is based on Azure Functions which communicate with Microsoft Flow (or really anything) using Azure queues. This allows a Flow, PowerApps, or Logic Apps developer to use whatever logic they wish and, when a Team is to be created, queue a message to an Azure Function which will do the work.

This is Part 3 of the series:

  1. Solution Overview
  2. Installing the solution
  3. Building a Flow for the solution (this post)
  4. Looking at the code
  5. A Change in Direction

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Calling Microsoft Graph from a single-page application: Part 2

~ Bob German ~ 1 Comment

This post was part of the “30 Days Microsoft Graph” blog series, now cross-posted to my personal blog. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to this excellent blog series. Many thanks to Brian Jackett, who organized this excellent blog series, and to Srinivas Varukala, who kindly edited my articles. In addition, thanks to others from the Graph and Azure AD teams who helped to test and QA the articles.

In Part 1 you learned how to register apps for both Azure AD v1 and v2 that can be used from the browser to enable Graph API calls. Today, we’ll use those registrations in some simple applications.

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Calling Microsoft Graph from a single-page application: Part 1

~ Bob German ~ 1 Comment

This post was part of the “30 Days Microsoft Graph” blog series, now cross-posted to my personal blog. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to this excellent blog series. Many thanks to Brian Jackett, who organized 30 Days Microsoft Graph, and to Srinivas Varukala, who kindly edited my articles. In addition, thanks to others from the Graph and Azure AD teams who helped to test and QA the articles.

In this article and the next, you’ll learn how to call Microsoft Graph APIs directly from a web browser in a Single Page Application much the same way that the Day 15 article showed how to call Graph from a .Net Core Console Application. This article will walk you through updating your app registrations (for v1 and v2) so they’ll work from the browser; in Part 2 we’ll dig into the code.

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