Wednesday 18 August 2021

Creating a Power Platform Custom Connector from a Postman Collection

Problem:  I like to discover an API and play with it using Postman.  I save the collection and theoretically I should be able to upload the postman collection into the custom connector to generate the Power Platform connector.  Until a few days ago, the custom connectors only supported Postman v1.0 collections.  And Postman has not save using the v1 format for a long time.  

I was happy to see the Custom connectors support v2.0 and 2.1 of postman collections.  Only problem is while it says it does if is still broken.  So I have to go the old school way.

I wanted to generate custom connectors for HMRC's REST API so that I can connect with the Power Platform.  Option 2 below gives me a way to build my collections using HMRC's API's and generate the appropriate version 2 Swagger definition.

Resolution

Option 1: 

  1. Export the postman collection in v2.1
  2. Upload the postman file to https://apitransform.com/ and generate the OpenAPI specification (version 3.0.0) gets generated.
  3. Upload the OpenAPI 3.0.0 specification file to Transformer | APIMatic and generate the JSON Open API 2.0 version.
  4. In Power Apps add a new custom connector based off the Open API file (version 2.0) to generate the connector.

The process is a pain, but this approach does not need any software installed.  I do feel Power Platform are about to improve by accepting the Postman v2 collections and it would be great if it could read Open API file in YAML and JSON in both V2.0 & 3.0 but any of these permutations would be a game changer.

Warning: Large collections end up with information being lost in the translations.

Option 2: 

  1. Export the postman collection in v2.1
  2. Upload the Postman 2.1 Collection file into Transformer | APIMatic and generate the JSON Open API 2.0 version.
  3. In Power Apps add a new custom connector based off the Open API file (version 2.0) to generate the connector.

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