DEV Community: Bryan Barrows

New webinar available - Getting Started with Okta Workflows

Bryan Barrows — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 20:46:01 +0000

Many thanks to @maxkatz for having me on today to deliver a webinar for folks who are getting started with Okta Workflows.

You can check out the recording here: Getting Started - User Activated Notification Flow - I also encourage you to follow our Crowdcast page to view replays of past events and join us again as we cover other topics in the future.

I covered how you can integrate Slack (or another messaging service such as MS Teams) with Okta and Okta Workflows to deliver real-time, dynamic notifications based on events happening in your Okta tenant.

Notification flows are an easy win and a great way to ease into using Okta Workflows - they're quick to configure and can deliver a lot of value to your teams.

We built a flow that welcomes users who have been activated in Okta, as well as notifying their manager that they're on board and encouraging them to say hello.

To show how easy it is to customize or extend these use cases, we also built a quick example that shows how you could alert your security team if an end user reports suspicious activity and were able to easily extend the flow to clear the user's Okta sessions and add them to a group with tight controls.

As always, feel free to join us for future webinars, or join a session of our Community Office Hours to see what other people are working on, ask questions about something you're building, or just say hi.

Okta Workflows How-To: Send stylized messages with MS Teams

Bryan Barrows — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 18:40:17 +0000

Okta Workflows makes it easy to build automations that notify or alert your teams with connectors to services like Slack and MS Teams.

Someone recently asked, "Why can't I add line-breaks to my MS Teams messages?"

As it turns out, we need to leverage the Custom API Action card so that we can specify that our content is HTML, rather than text.

With the default Send Message to Channel card, our content is sent as text and line-breaks are ignored. Writing our message in HTML allows us to include line-breaks, lists, headers, style our text with fonts & colors, and more.

We can use the Text - Compose card to write our HTML message.

We can use a pair of Object - Construct cards to construct our request payload. We create a message object that contains our message content and specifies our contentType as html. We then nest the message object in an object called body.

The payload should look something like:

{
  "body": {
    "contentType": "html",
    "content": "<h1 style=\"color:#FF0000;font-weight:bold\">Attention!</h1> <p>Thanks for reading! &#127867</p>"
  }
}

Finally, we use the Custom API Action card to

POST /teams/{team-id}/channels/{channel-id}/messages

Additional Resources:

Feel free to download my example, import it and try it out - just update the Relative URL in the Custom API Action to point at your own Team and Channel:

Download steps:

right click "view raw" in the panel above on the right
click "Save Link As"
be sure the filename ends in .flow

or check out my other guides and Workflows content (more coming soon!) here:

bbarrows89 / oktaworkflows

tips, flows, and more related to Okta Workflows

Okta Workflows Guides and Resources

Free Training - Foundations for Flowgrammers

Self-paced training to get started with Workflows
Foundations for Flowgrammers

Guides

Office Hours

Come join us in Community Office Hours!
We meet 3x a week and are here to help answer questions and get you unblocked while you're building.
Come with questions or just listen in to what other folks are building and working on.
Book a session

Dev.to

Posts by Workflows staff and community builders
https://dev.to/oktaworkflows

Max Katz

Max Katz blog
Max Katz is in charge of Community for Okta Workflows and has an excellent collection of tips and guides.

IAMSE.blog

IAMSE.blog/workflows
A blog run by Okta Sales Engineers that covers various Okta topics.

Contact Bryan

Feel free to contact me via LinkedIn

View on GitHub

Hope this helps! Find me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email if you have any questions.

You can also join us at a Community Office Hours session to work through problems and ask questions - I'd love to see you there.

GraphQL queries with Okta Workflows

Bryan Barrows — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 23:43:52 +0000

Okta Workflows is a stellar tool for orchestrating automations and has built-in integrations with a wide variety of services. Workflows also makes it easy to communicate with APIs via the API Connector functionality.

A customer recently asked, "What if I need to talk to a GraphQL service? Can Okta Workflows do that?"

Yes! In essence, GraphQL is just a text format used in HTTP payloads, so we can leverage Workflows to generate the queries and the HTTP Functions in the API Connector to make the calls.

I found this helpful list of free GraphQL APIs for projects and demos and decided to test out the Star Wars API.

Feel free to check it out :

Download steps:

right click "view raw" in the panel above on the right
click "Save Link As"
be sure the filename ends in .flow

or check out my other guides and Workflows content (more coming soon!) here:

bbarrows89 / oktaworkflows

tips, flows, and more related to Okta Workflows

Hope this helps! Find me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email if you have any questions.

You can also join us at a Community Office Hours session to work through problems and ask questions - I'd love to see you there.

Okta Workflows How-To: Retrieve Slack user status and other info using Custom API cards

Bryan Barrows — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 00:36:00 +0000

Okta Workflows includes an ever-growing library of connectable applications with pre-built actions and events that allow you to quickly automate business processes with ease.

However, there are times when we might know that an API that we're leveraging has a different endpoint or some other method by which we could extract additional necessary information.

These situations are what the Custom API Action cards included with each app connector are made for.

In this example, I've leveraged Slack - Custom API Cards to retrieve the full user profile as well as their status (active/away).

To accomplish this, we'll reference Slack's API docs to learn more about the /users.info and /users.getPresence methods.

A simple GET to those Relative URLs should do the trick...

Use a Slack - Read User to get the Slack User ID.
Use an Object - Construct with a key of user and input the Slack ID from the previous step. We'll use this query object in both of our Slack - Custom API cards to specify which user we want information about.
Use two Slack - Custom API cards with a method of GET and the following Relative URLs:
- /users.info
- /users.getPresence
Drag the object output from Step 2 into the "Query" input of each Custom API card.

And that's all there is to it! Looks like it worked:

Now you can use a pair of Object - Get Multiple cards to parse data out of each response body.

Notes

I've used Okta - User Added to Group for sake of example. You can substitute this to meet your needs. Just make sure to use the Slack - Read User to get the Slack User ID needed for the query object.
If you zoom in on my flow, you'll also notice that I built some error handling into my flow by putting my Custom API calls within an "If Error" card and building outputs in the case of a success as well as a failure. It's never a bad idea to build some error handling into your flows to make them more robust.

Feel free to download this example and import it to your environment:

Download steps:

right click "view raw" in the panel above on the right
click "Save Link As"
be sure the filename ends in .flow

Hope this helps! Find me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email if you have any questions.

You can also join us at a Community Office Hours session to work through problems and ask questions - I'd love to see you there.