How to call #webapi from #PowerPlatform #Portals

In almost all of my portal projects I get a question from my clients: "How to call an external api from #portals"? This question has been common that I decided to write about my experience on this topic which might be helpful for the community. This post will focus on two main areas: 

1. The available options to integrate #portals with external
2. A step by step guide on one of the least discussed options which is using Oauth Implicit Grant flow and how I created a simple demo for one of my customers

Scenario

I would like to give a business context to this scenario. Any enterprise solution requires integration and interaction of multiple systems which #portals could be one of them. Imagine a scenario where a customer is looking for a quote on a product in the company portal. In this case the #portal is required to bring quote details from CPQ (Configure Price Quote) system to the portal. In another scenario, a #portal is required to integrate with a core banking system to get the customer's latest balances. In these scenarios and similar ones, we will require the #portal to integrate with an external api to get information.

In order to enable such integrations, the #portal must be able to make calls in a secure way as most of the internal systems require authentication before anything can happen. So what are the options available?

Solutions

Since #powerplatform #portals are tightly integrated with #powerplatform, in most cases the integration is done through the #powerplatform itself. However, the integration through these #powerplatform has three flavors.

The first one is creating actions in the platform which communicated with external API and manages the requests and responses; then calling the actions through a workflow where the workflow is triggered using Entity Form or Entity List events.

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