Flow: Tell me how long does it take to get to the Office
Yes, Sir!
Simple fact of life: One goes to work and is subject to the everyday hassles of the industrial existence: Traffic and the normal inconveniences of our environment, it’s a good idea for me to get a notification in my mobile saying how long does it take to get to my place of work. So I can adjust my pace.
How to do it?
Easy, create a Flow in Office 365
The requirements:
- An Office 365 Subscription
- A Bing Maps Key
- A mobile phone to receive notifications
A quick look of the steps
1. The first thing is to configure how often this is going to run:
Run every week, Monday to Friday every 15 minutes starting at 7 am and finishing at 9:59 am
2. Then we’ll configure the route using the Bing and this requires and API key to make the call
Going from my house to the Office driving, and requesting Time with Traffic . The Bing API can be requested here and it’s free
The Bing connection will produce the time travel in seconds, these would need to be converted to minutes, storing the output in a variable and performing the arithmetic operation:
Variable name is: TravelTime of Integer type and the value is the arithmerical operation of seconds divided by 60
This is the Formula: div(body(‘Get_route’)?[‘travelDurationTraffic’],60)
I send a notification to my mobile, saying: Time to get to the office is the value of the TravelTime variable. Bing also returns the traffic condition plus the Travel Distance in Km or Miles
How the notification looks on my iphone