Since I began my journey in IT, I’ve managed all my projects through Azure DevOps. When used correctly, DevOps is a powerful tool for solution development. However, it’s easy to lose track of tasks—especially if, like me, you tend to complete tasks but sometimes forget to update the hours or close them. In such cases, setting up a reminder can be incredibly helpful.
To create this reminder, we’ll use Power Automate to pull information from a custom query set up in DevOps. While I won’t cover setting up queries in DevOps here, you can refer to Microsoft Learn’s documentation for guidance on managing and organizing your queries.
Once your query is ready, let’s move over to Power Automate. For this demonstration, we’ll use an instant trigger.
Step 1: Call the Azure DevOps Query
Our first action after the trigger will be to fetch the query results from Azure DevOps. Use the “Get query results” action, then select the project name and the query ID.
The query will return a JSON payload, and there are multiple ways to handle it. For our purposes, we’ll send an email to notify the relevant parties of their time status.
Step 2: Process and Format the JSON Payload
Power Automate’s Send Email action supports simple HTML and CSS styling, which allows us to format the email content. We will structure the JSON data as an HTML table. To start, we’ll initialize a string variable that will serve as our row constructor, holding the content for each column in the table.
To build our rows, we will use the “Append to String” variable action to add rows based on the number of rows returned in our JSON object. You’ll notice that we’ll be using HTML tags and inserting our dynamic content between these tags. We’ll also apply inline CSS styling, which will be useful when we construct the final email notification.
Once we insert our dynamic content, Power Automate will automatically create an “Apply to each” loop. This loop will iterate over each item in the JSON object, appending a new row to our table for each iteration. This approach ensures that every entry is neatly formatted and included in the final email notification.
Step 3: Send Email Notification
In our final step, we’ll send an email notification containing the content of our string variable. You’ll see that I’ve included the table tags to encapsulate our formatted rows, along with headers for each column and some additional styling for clarity.
One important detail to remember when setting up the “Send Email” action is to enable the HTML content option. This tells Power Automate that we are using our own HTML and CSS styling. By doing so, our email will properly display the structured table and styling we’ve applied, ensuring a professional and readable notification for the recipients.
By following these steps, you can ensure that your DevOps tasks are always up to date and that all team members are aware of their status, ultimately enhancing productivity and organization.
Really useful post! I like the step-by-step approach. I’ll be waiting to see what other Power Automate tricks you share for keeping DevOps tasks organized.