Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

I am experiencing an unexpected behavior with the Excel "List rows present in a table" action in Power Automate.

In my flow, I set a Filter Query:

Status eq 'Approver 1'

The flow is scheduled to run every 10 minutes to check whether there are any rows in the Excel table with the status "Approver 1".

However, recently I noticed that sometimes the filter query is not applied, and the action returns all rows from the Excel table, even when the Status value does not match the filter.

For example, rows with the following statuses are still returned:

Closed
Approver 2

These values clearly do not match the filter query Status eq 'Approver 1'.

Additional observations:

This issue happens intermittently (not every run).
It is affecting multiple flows, not just one.
The flows are reading from Excel files stored in SharePoint/OneDrive.
The Excel data is formatted as a Table.

Questions:

Has anyone experienced a similar issue where the Filter Query in "List rows present in a table" is ignored?
Is this a known limitation or bug with the Excel connector?
Are there recommended best practices to make the filtering more reliable?
What can I do to prevent this issue in the future?

Any suggestions or references would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Categories:

General topics

Hi there!

A picture is worth a thousand words! That gateway timeout essentially means your filter query is going to get ignored, partially applied, or skipped. The file may be in a locked state if you are using "list rows present in a table" consecutively ~ it looks like you might be repeating the action and using a different filter query each time.

A better/recommended way forward it to return all rows, turn on pagination if the row count is going to exceed 256 rows and then to get the array of Status eq 'Approver 1' use a FILTER ARRAY action after get rows present in a table (no filter query)

@equals(item()?['Status'], 'Approver 1')

...

Do the action need to do for Approver 1...

FILTER ARRAY action again...

@equals(item()?['Status'], 'Approver 2')

etc, etc...

That should solve this for you. So essentially you are pulling ALL ROWS one time with 'list rows present in a table' Excel action then filter array action gets you the dataset you need downstream. That's also going to help prevent file locking and gateway timeouts.

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Tom

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