Solving Real World Scenarios with Microsoft Flow

This is my first post in English. The reason is I’m using an API named EU VAT API provided by chema.

Up to now for me Microsoft Flow was just one new hot thing offered by Microsoft. But this article has inspired me to challenge Flow with a real-world requirement.

One common task in Europe is to check the VAT Registration Number of a given company. You will find many solutions if you search the Internet. I myself have implemented solutions in VBA, SSIS and so on.

But can this be done in Microsoft Flow? The short answer is Yes. To be honest if you use the api provided by chema it is surprisingly easy after all. Here is my demo solution:

+ In Flow my starting trigger is “When a new email arrives”:

+ I’m checking if the body of the mail contains the phrase “*VAT*”:

+ If so I’m calling the API where subject is the address of the API + the subject of the mail received which in fact is the VAT Reg. No. to check:

In the last step the result of the API call is returned to the sender

+ The first mail looks like this:

+ And the return mail I receive almost immediately goes like this:

The flow in the result window looks like this:

No this was really very simple and absolutely no coding required. Challenge No. 1 won by Microsoft Flow…