Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 21 Jun 2023

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From YouTube: Cracking the Code: Demystifying the Data Outputs in Power Automate

Description

A bookings appointment request trigger example. In this 7-minute citizen developer focused presentation, Cat Schneider articulates the challenge - bookings requests come in and how to you get custom question responses out that are stored in an array of objects. Solution - use a compose action to generate new JSON for use in later actions. Look at action outputs, specifically a triggerOutputs(). Step through getting output values, understanding the output, and key take aways. Conversation.

This PnP Community demo is taken from the Microsoft Power Platform community call – June 2023, recorded on June 21, 2023.

Demo Presenter
• Cat Schneider | @YerAWizardCat

Community Call Conversation
• aka.ms/June21-Demo1

Supporting materials
• Documentation - Defining inputs and outputs | https://learn.microsoft.com/power-automate/guidance/planning/define-input-output

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• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/community/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/community/videos
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• Microsoft 365 Platform Community Blog - https://aka.ms/community/blog

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Hello, I am cat Schneider, so Power Platform, Enthusiast, self-taught coder programmer developer Scientist by Nature I'm. Just naturally curious didn't happen to be a native-ish Floridian. There's like six months, sometimes where it's beginning we're we're. Not we don't have time, but that's it, um but I am now a career. Switcher I was in business units in government for about 15 years. I am now Power, Platform developer, so I've done the whole career switch situation because of Power Platform, but most recently um Microsoft business, apps and VP. As of this month.

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But I love making the impossible possible or what other people think is impossible to be a possibility so um jumping into Power automate outputs, so actions within power automate. They output data in a whole variety of ways, and usually this is going to be in Json and it's Json, not Json in case anybody was wondering, uh but you've got strings. You have integers Boolean values, dates date times and grids GUI IDs.

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However, you want to pronounce that, um but what they really truly mostly come out as are arrays in arrays of objects, so various action, outputs, I've done power, automate flows that send HTTP HTTP requests to SharePoint, there's a whole lot. There I've done it for power apps for admins to get apps as an admin and there's a whole lot in there, but it's Json and it's everywhere.

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So the reason for my presentation or the little bit of background about this presentation is someone in the community, another good friend of mine. She had a bookings request that would come in and she's trying to get custom question responses back out of it. So this right here is just a compose action that took that trigger body and and dropped it in there. But we're going to focus on this bit here, um which was getting the output values. So her problem was she needed both of the custom question answers that were included in here.

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Those responses were stored, an array of objects and she tried creating a variable then using a for each action and then setting that variable to these answered values which just over wrote the value from before so Lucian was use a compose action to generate new Json.

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So we've got this compose action here. It's creating a new Json object, that's got a company value and an employee ID value, and it's getting that information out based on this bit here, so we've got trigger outputs, we've got questions, answers which option and then the answer. So what all does this mean?

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So the trigger outputs, it's getting everything from the output of the trigger and then there's this question mark- and this took me the longest time to figure out, but the question mark just means if it exists, so if it exists, I want to get from the body object.

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The get custom question answers, object and then I wanted to get the individual pieces out of the array and when it's an array you have to pick that specific object from the array using the index. So the first object always starts at position zero and then moves up from there and then I needed the answer field that that was the key that I needed to get. So all that being said, you stick that in this compose action and now I've got a Json object with a company value and an employee ID value.

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So you take away from this question mark super helpful, but it's not necessary if the object always exists. So this here that I'm showing is the exact same as this. It's just taking that question mark out. If it's always going to be there question mark it's not needed, but if there's a slight chance or possibility that the object is not going to be there, do yourself a favor and put the question mark in there.

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The forward slash it's a helpful shortcut when accessing an object within another object.

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This is the same thing you just take out that slash, but you put that slash in there now you don't need an extra four or five characters.

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All key names they have to be within that single set of quilts within set within those square brackets and then selecting an object with an array. It requires you to use the index.

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You cannot do the forward, slash this through the forward, slash that when it's an array, you've got to select it with an index and then just fun facts, I, use, parse, Json or compose action to get the the outputs of any actions that I'm trying to work through so I'll, throw in a parse Json I'll, throw in a compose um to get that out, run the flow and see what it returns.

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But the parse Json like with this one here, I put in the body from the bookings app and then to get around the requirement for the schemer I put in two curly braces and that's that's all that's needed to get that requirement fulfilled, run the action and I can get the whole thing to come out copy paste that back into the parse Json later for the generate from sample, and it works. It just works.

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So if you are still lost from here, though, fear not because you can get me out on the interwebs, so that is my presentation.

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Right, no sun, no sun, I, I yeah, maybe that's okay, I got credit.