While working on a Microsoft Flow to automate some tweeting for the O365Eh! Podcast, I ran into a known restriction when using @mention in the available Twitter connector.

Mentioning an @user while posting a tweet is not supported. Specifically, the “@” characters will be stripped while posting a tweet. - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/twitter/

I run this podcast with 3 other Canadian MVPs and the goal of this flow was to link to all our Twitter accounts. I tried many workarounds; adding more @ symbols in a row, encoding the @ and even looked if I could build my own Microsoft Flow Twitter connector, but ran into Oauth 1.0 limitations.

I landed on building an PowerShell Azure Function API and calling it via the flow HTTP Action. Could it still be considered low-code if I sourced most of the pieces?

I tried a number of PowerShell Twitter API scripts before settling on Shannon Conley & Mehmet Kaya’s GITHub Project: InvokeTwitterAPIs.

To use the Twitter API, you must obtain a Twitter API Key + Secret and User Access Token + Secret:

1. Head over to https://apps.twitter.com/ and “Create New App” after signing in to your Twitter account.
2. Define the Application Name, Description, Website, agree to the Developer Agreement and Click “Create your Twitter application”.
3. Click the “Keys and Access Tokens” tab and Click “Create my access token”.
4. In my testing, I would get an error “Sorry, that page does not exist” but didn’t seem to cause any issues.
5. Document the API Key, API Secret, Access Token and Access Token Secret.

I won’t go into the step by step to create a PowerShell Azure Function HTTP trigger, Brain Bunke has a great blog around this: http://www.brianbunke.com/blog/2018/02/27/powershell-in-azure-functions/.

Key is to turn on “Experimental Language Support” and Select “PowerShell” on the “HTTP trigger” Azure Functions template.

I also added the API Key, API Secret, Access Token and Access Token Secret as Application settings for the Function Apps.

For the run.ps1 of the Twitter function, I have three parts:

1. A block of code at the top to deal with the HTTP trigger’s JSON input and Twitter API application settings.

$response = $null
Write-Output "http trigger executed: $(get-date)"
$requestBody = Get-Content $req -raw -Encoding utf8 | ConvertFrom-Json

$OAuth = @{
	'ApiKey' = $env:TwitterApiKey
	'ApiSecret' = $env:TwitterApiSecret
	'AccessToken' = $env:TwitterAccessToken
	'AccessTokenSecret' = $env:TwitterAccessTokenSecret
}

$ResourceURL = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/$($requestBody.Resource)"
$Method = $requestBody.Method.toupper()
$Parameters = @{}
$requestBody.Parameters.psobject.Properties | Foreach { $Parameters[$_.Name] = $($_.Value -replace 'http.*://',"" -replace ':',"") }

2. The raw PowerShell code for the InvokeTwitterAPIs.psm1 (I only kept the Get-Oauth and Invoke-TwitterRestMethod functions). I could have used FTP to upload the complete .psm1 module to the Azure Function, but wasn’t sure if I needed to modify the functions or not.

   • InvokeTwitterAPIs.psm1: InvokeTwitterAPIs.psm1

3. A block of code at the bottom to call the functions and return data to the HTTP trigger.

$Tweet = Invoke-TwitterRestMethod -ResourceURL $ResourceURL -RestVerb $Method -Parameters $Parameters -OAuthSettings $OAuth
$response = $Tweet | ConvertTo-Json -depth 5 | Out-String
$response | Out-File -Encoding Ascii -FilePath $res
Write-Output "http message response '$response'"
Write-Output "http trigger completed: $(get-date)"

I leveraged two tests when building the Azure Function.

1. A simple query of my Twitter handle grabbing the latest tweet:

{
	"Resource": "search/tweets.json",
	"Method": "Get",
	"Parameters": {"q":"realtimeuc","count": "1"}
}

2. Post a tweet that included mentions, emoji and a URL. Warning: Don’t run a post test too many times in a row with the same data. My first Twitter API got locked out and had to create a new one. I was running this test many times to figure out the code required to get URLs and encoding correct. Many hours wasted trying to figure what change I did that broke everything. Finally logged into https://apps.twitter.com to find the API was blocked.

{
  "Resource": "statuses/update.json",
  "Method": "POST",
  "Parameters": {
    "status": "O365Eh! 🇨🇦 Episode #6 - Direct Routing http://o365eh.com/2018/04/03/episode-6-direct-routing/ @RealTimeUC @HabibMankal @dinocaputo @InsideSkype Also available on #iTunes #Googlemusic #MicrosoftTeams #MSTeams #Skype4b #Office365"
  }
}

On the Microsoft Flow side, I created a simple Flow Button Trigger and added the HTTP-HTTP action with “Method” set to Post, I placed the Azure Function URL as the “Uri” and my desired JSON as the “Body”. I’m also able to leverage Dynamic Content in more complex flows.