In an earlier post, it was outlined how to setup a Microsoft Flow workflow to generate a notification on a phone when a web request was made. This post will outline how to create such a web request using the popular scripting language Python.

Install Python

• Ensure that Python (version 3) is installed on the system
• During this process it is important to ensure that Python is added to the system PATH variable
  • This allows Python to be called from the command line
  • Having this ability will make it significantly easier to schedule this script to run when events occur, which is likely to be the role of the script.
• After python is installed, we must install the “requests” library
  • This is the library that we will use to perform the actual request
  • Note: It is possible to perform the POST request without the “requests” library, however I believe it to be the cleanest method.
  • To install “requests” open a command line and enter “pip install requests”
    • If you get an error running this command, it is likely that Python was not added correctly to the system’s PATH variable

The Code Itself

• First we need to import the “requests” library we just installed into the Python script
  • This is done with the following code:

  • import requests

• Next we need to define the URL to which the request will be made
  • This can be found in your workflow you created previously and will be unique to each Flow

  • URL = "https://prod-02.australiasoutheast.logic.azure.com:443/workflows/.......

• Next we need to define the JSON that will be sent in the request to provide the parameters to our notification service
  • For my notification I only had two parameters, a source and a message
  • For the purpose of this example I have set the source parameter to be “Computer” and the message parameter to be “42”

  • Parameters = {"Source" : "Computer", "Message" : "42"}

• Finally we perform the actual request from the server
  • For the request to execute, we need to provide it with the URL and parameters we defined earlier

  • Request = requests.post(URL, json = Parameters)

• After running the code you should now get a notification on your phone
• By changing the values contained in the parameters section you can change the contents of the messages to whatever you wish.