Microsoft Power Automate is a powerful cloud and desktop automation platform. Sometimes its users may need to extract data from various documents, and this is where ABBYY Vantage comes in.
ABBYY Vantage offers a RESTful API, which allows you to access its functionality from external systems. In this post, I’ll show how you can call the ABBYY Vantage API from Microsoft Power Automate.
I assume you have working knowledge of Microsoft Power Automate, so I will skip the basics. If you are not familiar with the platform, I’d recommend that you read this guide first: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/getting-started
We will be using two actions:
- 1. HTTP action to call the API
- 2. Parse JSON action to process responses
To read about the available methods, please open the Swagger UI:
https://<VantageURL>/api/index.html?urls.primaryName=publicapi%2Fv1
Figure 1. HTTP action from HTTP connector.
The HTTP action has everything you need to call the REST API. These are fields that we’ll be using: Method, URI, Headers, and Body.
Figure 2. Expanded HTTP action.
Authenticating in ABBYY Vantage
The ABBYY Vantage API uses token-based authentication. This means that you need to receive a token first and use it in subsequent calls.
To connect to ABBYY Vantage, you must select POST as the method to be used for the URI.
NOTE: Here and below, <text in brackets> indicates a placeholder for your own data (e.g. URL or credentials).
|
Method |
POST |
|
URI |
<VantageURL>/auth/connect/token |
|
Headers: Content-Type |
application/x-www-form-urlencoded |
|
Body |
grant_type=password&scope=openid&username=<your username>&password=<your password> client_id=ABBYY.Vantage&client_secret=f3ec6136-6ccc-75a1-3780-caeef723e998 |
|
Authentication |
None |
Figure 3. Receiving an authentication token.
In the next step, we need to extract the authentication token from the API response. The response comes in JSON format. To parse the JSON response, we’ll use the Parse JSON action.
Figure 4. Parsing the response with the Parse JSON action.
Schema:
{
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"access_token": {
"type": "string"
},
"expires_in": {
"type": "integer"
},
"token_type": {
"type": "string"
},
"scope": {
"type": "string"
}
}
}
After parsing the response, the “access_token” value will become available.
Calling an ABBYY Vantage skill
To call an ABBYY Vantage skill, we’ll use a combined “run” call to create and start a transaction in one call. Use the following HTTP action:
|
Method |
POST |
|
URI |
<VantageURL>/api/publicapi/v1/transactions/run |
|
Headers: Authorization |
Bearer <access_token> |
|
Headers: Content-Type |
application/json |
|
Body |
{ "skillid": "39458774-39b1-4374-bc5f-4d3a9161a898", "file": { "content": "<content bytes>", "fileName": "<file name>" } } |
|
Authentication |
none |
SkillID is the ID of the Invoice US skill. To find out the IDs of your skills, call <VantageURL>/api/publicapi/v1/skills with cUrl or Swagger UI https://<VantageURL>/api/index.html?urls.primaryName=publicapi%2Fv1
In the next step, we parse the response using the Parse JSON action.
{
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"transactionId": {
"type": "string"
}
}
}
After parsing the response, the “transactionId” value will become available.
Figure 5. Creating a connection and calling a skill.
Getting the processing result
To get the processing results, we need to use an HTTP action with following parameters:
|
Method |
GET |
|
URI |
<VantageURL>/api/publicapi/v1/transactions/<transactionId> |
|
Headers: Authorization |
Bearer <access_token> |
|
Authentication |
none |
Parse the response with the Parse JSON action:
{
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"id": {
"type": "string"
},
"status": {
"type": "string"
},
"documents": {
"type": "array",
"items": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"id": {
"type": "string"
},
"resultFiles": {
"type": "array",
"items": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"fileId": {
"type": "string"
},
"fileName": {
"type": "string"
},
"type": {
"type": "string"
}
},
"required": [
"fileId",
"fileName",
"type"
]
}
},
"businessRulesErrors": {
"type": "array"
}
},
"required": [
"id",
"resultFiles",
"businessRulesErrors"
]
}
},
"sourceFiles": {
"type": "array",
"items": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"id": {
"type": "string"
},
"name": {
"type": "string"
}
},
"required": [
"id",
"name"
]
}
}
}
}
Downloading files
Files can be downloaded using the same HTTP actions. You can place additional conditions on the process. I don’t post the conditions here to save space.
|
Method |
GET |
|
URI |
<VantageURL>/api/publicapi/v1/transactions/<transactionId>/files/ |
|
Headers: Authorization |
Bearer <access_token> |
|
Authentication |
none |
Figure 6. Downloading a file and sending it by e-mail.
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