COMMITTEE ON GAMES AND AMUSEMENTS | JUNE 2, 2026

[0:00]Hello, this is a demonstration of how you can create your first custom connector on Power Platform. I'm assuming that you already have an Azure subscription and you have also created your first web API application. In this demonstration, I'm going to quickly create a web API application by using the Visual Studio wizard. For that, let's open up Visual Studio and then I'm going to choose ASP.NET Core web API. Click on next. Let's give it a name like custom connector demo. And then I'm going to click on next. I'm using .NET 6. Make sure that you have checked enable open API support. Click on create. This will create a web API application for you. It also comes with a default weather forecast controller. I'm going to run this application and check the swagger page. This will give you a quick understanding of what exactly this API does. You can see that there is a get method here which returns a collection of weather forecast. Let's test this out. Click on try it out and then click on execute. You can see that it returned a JSON array which has certain weather forecast data. Now, the next step is to publish this particular web API application to Azure App Service. For that, I'm going to right click on the project name and then choose publish. I'm going to choose Azure as the target and then Azure App Service, Windows, and click on next. Then I'm going to choose create new Azure App Service. Give it a name. Let's say custom connector demo API. I'm going to choose my resource group and hosting plan. Click on create. This will create the app service for you in Azure. Once it is created, I'm going to click on finish and then click on publish. This will publish your application to Azure App Service. Once the publishing is complete, it will open up the Azure portal in your browser. I'm going to add a forward slash swagger to navigate to the swagger page of this particular web API. You can see that your web API has been successfully published to Azure App Service. Now that our web API has been successfully published to Azure App Service, the next step is to expose the web API definition as an Open API standard, previously called Swagger. For that, I'm going to navigate to the home page of my Azure App Service. And then, I'm going to search for API definition. There you can see that there is an option called API definition. I'm going to click on that. And then in the API definition URL, I'm going to provide the URL to my swagger page. My web API URL is custom connector demo API.azurewebsites.net. And then I'm going to add forward slash swagger forward slash v1 forward slash swagger.json. Make sure that you have mentioned the full path to your swagger.json file. Now, click on save. Once that is done, the next step is to create a custom connector on Power Platform. For that, I'm going to open up make.powerapps.com. And then in the left navigation pane, I'm going to choose more and then choose discover all. From there, I'm going to choose custom connectors. Click on new custom connector and choose create from Azure service. I'm going to give it a name custom connector demo. And it will automatically pull the web APIs that are available in my Azure subscription. I'm going to choose the custom connector demo API. This is the web API that we have just published to Azure App Service. Now, click on create. This will create a new custom connector for you. The next step is to choose the scheme as HTTPS. The host would be automatically populated. You can add a small description here like retrieves weather forecast. You can also upload an icon for your custom connector. I'm going to click on security tab. We're not going to use any authentication type for this particular web API. Because it does not have any authentication. I'm going to click on definition. You can see that the get weather forecast operation has been successfully pulled from your web API. Next, let's click on test. Before you test your custom connector, you have to create a new connection. So I'm going to click on new connection. Click on create. And then click on test operation. You can see that it has returned the same response that we have received from the swagger page earlier. Now, the next step is to use this custom connector in Power Apps. For that, I'm going to open up make.powerapps.com. And then I'm going to choose apps from the left navigation pane. Click on new app and then canvas. I'm going to choose a blank app from blank. I'm going to choose phone layout. Let's give it a name like custom connector demo app. Click on create. This will create a new Power App for you. Next, I'm going to add a data source. I'm going to search for custom connector demo, which is the custom connector that we have just created. Click on add. Now that the custom connector has been added as a data source, let's try to make a call to the web API. For that, I'm going to add a new button to my Power App. Let's give it a name like load weather data. And in the OnSelect property of this button, I'm going to add a formula to call the custom connector. So I'm going to say clear collect and then I'm going to give a collection name like weather data. And then I'm going to call my custom connector, which is custom connector demo, and then do get weather forecast, which is the operation that we have defined. Once that is done, I'm going to add a new gallery to my Power App to display the data that we have received from the custom connector. Let's choose blank vertical gallery. And then I'm going to change the data source to weather data, which is the collection that we are populating from the custom connector. I'm going to change the layout as title, subtitle, and body. You can see that there are three fields that we are receiving from the web API, which is date, summary, and temperature C. Let's map this data to our gallery. So in the title, I'm going to change this to this item.summary. In the subtitle, I'm going to change this to this item.date. And in the body, I'm going to change this to this item.temperaturec. Now, let's run this application and check the output. Click on load weather data. You can see that the weather data has been successfully populated in the gallery. So that's how you can create your first custom connector in Power Platform.