Exploring Graph

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An introduction to calling Microsoft Graph within Power Automate Part two of a four-part series of blogs
Microsoft Graph is the (strange and misleading) name for the gateway provided by Microsoft to get at all of the things stored in your 365 cloud (emails, files, users, groups, teams and much more). This tutorial explains what Graph is in more detail, and shows how you can call Graph from within Power Automate flows. What is Microsoft Graph? Exploring Graph (this blog) Getting things from Graph Accessing HTTP request results within your flow

An introduction to calling Microsoft Graph within Power Automate

Part two of a four-part series of blogs

Microsoft Graph is the (strange and misleading) name for the gateway provided by Microsoft to get at all of the things stored in your 365 cloud (emails, files, users, groups, teams and much more). This tutorial explains what Graph is in more detail, and shows how you can call Graph from within Power Automate flows.

What is Microsoft Graph?
Exploring Graph (this blog)
Getting things from Graph
Accessing HTTP request results within your flow

Posted by Andy Brown on 30 November 2023

In this blog

Step 1 - identify what you want
Step 2 - running your query
Step 3 - parsing the resulting JSON
Step 4 - copy or note down the Graph URL

Microsoft have provided an excellent tool called Graph Explorer which lets you see what information you can retrieve using Graph:

The Graph Explorer home page.

Below is how to use this to see what data Graph will provide to you (and in what format), using the example of listing out the teams of which you are a member.

I believe that (rather meanly) you have be signed in to a 365 account to use this service (although if you haven't got a 365 account it's difficult to see why you'd want to learn about Microsoft Graph ...).

Step 1 - identify what you want

The first thing to do is to choose what you want to retrieve:

For our example (listing the teams that you're a member of) the category is obvious.

You can then choose the individual item:

Again, this is also self-evident for our example.

Step 2 - running your query

The next thing to do is to run this test query:

Click on this button to run your query.

Step 3 - parsing the resulting JSON

You should then have a look to see what information you can usefully pull out of the JSON returned from this query:

This imaginary person belongs to (among others) the HR Taskforce team.

Step 4 - copy or note down the Graph URL

Finally, copy the URL used by Microsoft Graph to retrieve this data:

You'll need to use this URL in your flow in the next part of this blog.

The URLs required for accessing Graph are impressively simple - it's the authentication you'll need to provide which can be the stumbling block, although the next part of this blog shows a couple of ways to avoid this.