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Passing Values From Power Automate to Desktop Flow via Text File

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Posted on by Ukiman1014

I have a cloud flow that calls a desktop flow to which I need to pass three text values. Since OneDrive is accessible to both, I'm using the Create File action to create a .txt file in OneDrive with one value per line. The text file is created successfully and looks fine. In Desktop, the Get file content step is only retrieving "Byte [50]".

When I look at Get file content's documentation, it says the output is binary. How can I simply read the text from the file, splitting each line into a variable? Again, this is a text file in OneDrive, it is not local.

Is there a better way to pass text values from cloud to desktop flows?

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Power Automate Desktop

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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Yes, there is. Use Input variables in the desktop flow. They can be added here:

Add an input variable of type text and then, when launching the desktop flow from the cloud flow, the Run a flow built with Power Automate for desktop action will ask you to provide values for the input variables. You can add as many as you want.
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Ukiman1014 on at

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Thank you! I then struggled a bit with getting variables that I passed to the desktop flow into and back from PowerShell. I learned that I can pass multiple variables into PowerShell, but only get one out. Well, there's the main output variable and then another one containing any errors.

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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Yes, the Run PowerShell script action only supports returning a single variable as output. You can return a JSON blob though and convert it to an object in PAD using the Convert JSON to custom object action, if you want several output values.
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