ep-azFunc-m365Messaging-report

Azure Function to get messages from Azure Service Bus Queue and insert them as rows into an Azure Storage Table to be used for reporting via Power BI.

Config Items:

• BUS_CONNECTION_STR, connection string to connect to the Service Bus Namespace, the secret is a reference to be looked up within a Key Vault.
• QUEUE_NAME, the name of the queue that messages will be retrieved from within the Service Bus.
• TABLE_NAME, the table name within the Storage Account where the records will be uploaded into.
• TBL_CONNECTION_STR, connection string to connect to the Storage Account, the secret is a reference to be looked up within a Key Vault.

This function is invoked directly via a timer.

The following is the function sequence (once the timer is invoked):

• Initialises the receiver for the Service Bus Queue.
• Iterates through each message using the receiver.
• Within the loop an empty dictionary is created that will be the entity that is uploaded as a table row.
• Message is loaded (json) and an ID is obtained from a key to be used as the Partition Key.
• A Simple Namespace is initialised and passed the key value arguments from the message.
• An ID is obtained from the namespace that is unique to the message (Rowkey).
• The Partition Key and Rowkey variables are updated into the empty dictionary.
• Loop then iterates through the namespace items, where there is a key and value these are added to the entity
• If an item value contains a list then iterate through and comma separate the values under the original key
• If its a dictionary then skip past this (I know in these M365 Messages that the dictionary is the message text updates which I do not require for reporting)
• Upload the entity to the storage table.
• Complete the message to remove it from the Service Bus Queue.

TimerTrigger - Python

The TimerTrigger makes it incredibly easy to have your functions executed on a schedule. This sample demonstrates a simple use case of calling your function every 5 minutes.

For a TimerTrigger to work, you provide a schedule in the form of a cron expression(See the link for full details). A cron expression is a string with 6 separate expressions which represent a given schedule via patterns. The pattern we use to represent every 5 minutes is 0 */5 * * * *. This, in plain text, means: "When seconds is equal to 0, minutes is divisible by 5, for any hour, day of the month, month, day of the week, or year".