Passing complex Objects and Collections from PowerApps to MS Flow?

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Posted on by DenisMolodtsov

317

Is there a way to pass Complex objects from PowerApps to MS Flow?

I've seen some strange suggestions to create a sting by concatination and pass to to MS Flow. Is this still the case is there no way to pass objects to Flow?

For example, we need to pass an array of 40 objects to MS Flow and every object looks like this:

{ FullName:"Denis Molodtsov",
 RequiredEmail: true,
 ProjectID: 122
}

Does anyone have any elegant solutions for this task? Any helps is greatly appreciated!

ComplexPowerAppObject 2.png

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Building Power Apps

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Rebetcha 645 on at

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Great question. I am not sure to be honest. Have you tried out your suggestions? What were the results?
DenisMolodtsov 317 on at

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Well, the only suggestion that I've seen is to iterate through all objects and properties and concatenate a long string. Then pass this string to a Flow. Then, inside MS Flow I need to parse that string manually.

I'm sure most developers will agree that it sounds like a very ugly suggestion. Stone-age-like solution. I'm going to start implemeting it tomorrow if there is no other way. But before doing it, I wanted to make sure that I'm not doing something stupid. If I could just pass objects to MS flow, I would really like to do it.
Rebetcha 645 on at

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Unfortunatly I think you are right. I tried several options, but as soon as I added an action with an array input in a Flow where I wanted to get the array from PowerApps the adding of the Flow to PowerApps failed.
Instead of using the long string I think I would save the array as a table in a temporary datasource (could be a SharePoint list) and use that datasource in your Flow. Makes updating the Flow as soon as there is some good way to pass an array to your Flow easier.
Rebetcha 645 on at

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Maybe found something. You could have a look at the concat function. According to the formula description "The Concat function concatenates the result of a formula applied across all the records of a table, resulting in a single string. "
In Flow you still have to parse the string, though.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/functions/function-concatenate
svijay_001 Microsoft Employee on at

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@DenisMolodtsov

I was able to get this done by using the JSON method in powerapps. I have detailed it on the below article :

Pass Power Apps collection to Flow

The idea is to have the collection converted to JSON and parse the JSON object at the Flow end like any other JSON Object.
DeeTronSEAM 396 on at

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The link @svijay_001 provided is sending me to what seems to be an unrelated post (i.e. https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Discussion/powerapps-and-planner-task/td-p/47785 ). This post ( https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Discussion/Passing-the-PowerApps-Collection-to-MS-Flow/m-p/299054#M86063 ) seems to be the one svijay_001 is referring to. Regardless, thanks @svijay_001