Marcel Lehmann

I often get a request how to collect data from external users using PowerPlatform. Of course, MS Forms immediately comes to mind. Sure, this makes it easy to create an impersonal & undynamic form and the user has to fill in all the information.

However, the problem is not with MS Forms per se, but with the fact that all access is anonymous. (only company internal users can be authenticated via login) furthermore only authenticated users can upload and submit files.

What can my proposed solution and what does it look like?
– This can display dynamic content
– Can identify & associate each form user and their input
– any user can upload files

Solution: We use HTTP requests and HTML forms
(Note: this requires a PowerAutomate Premium license – but I think the customer experience should be worth it)

What do we need?

1. a flow which creates and sends the dynamic link to the form
2. a flow which dynamically fills in an html form and displays it to the user
3. a flow which processes the user input

1. The trigger flow

First we have to create the form flow because only after saving it we get the link to start this flow via link. We will then add a dynamic parameter to this link so that we can track it. Here i used MAIL=triggerinput()?[‘text’]

Download the scope ‘Creating dynamic link and sent with mail’

2. The form flow

Here is our html-form deposited. We can either save this as a file on SharePoint / OneDrive or another source and retrieve it or save it directly (as in this example) as html text in the flow.

for this we use a html-form template, which we can easily find on the internet and adapt some things. (i got my form from www.w3docs.com)

Download the scope ‘Creating dynamic form’

3. The processes flow

here we simply process the input of the user from the html-form incl. the parameter so that we can assign the user directly.