Get unique integer in Power Automate cloud flow

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Posted on by Kapil775

Hi All,

My cloud flow is accessed by multiple users, and it generates an integer (e.g., 1, 2...100, etc.) with each execution. Each flow instance needs to produce a unique integer. Currently, the integer is stored in an Excel Online sheet, which the flow accesses and increments by one, allowing subsequent flows to retrieve the next unique integer. This setup helps avoid duplicates under normal conditions.

However, if multiple users trigger the flow simultaneously, some flows end up generating duplicate integers. This happens because they are fetching the same integer from Excel Online before it is incremented by an another flow.

Could you suggest a solution? I'm open to saving the integer in a different source, as long as it doesn’t require a premium license. Also if possible, good to have flows generating sequential integers rather than random ones.

Thanks,

Kapil

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Building flows

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eetuRobo 4,204 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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You could use current date with hour, minutes, seconds and milliseconds. That should be safe way since I don't think people will start the flow at the same millisecond.

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If it doesn't need to be integer but could also be just string then use Guid() -expression which generates globally unique string.
Or you could use FlowRunId. Expression: workflow()['run']['name']. Then it would always be different id (string).

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Kapil775 28 on at

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Currently the integer returned by my flow is of three digits. Business wants the flow to return an integer having maximum of four digits. Anything beyond that might break their process.

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eetuRobo 4,204 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Then I would suggest using sharepoint list where you store those integer Id's since Excel can be bit slow to sync.

Or maybe you could make an extra flow that checks every hour that there aren't duplicates and if there are then increase the duplicate int id (and if there are rows after that then increase their int ids as well)

Note that since you only have four digits available then you will have only 9999 before the list needs to be cleared so hopefully they are just temporary id's and don't need to be stored for too long.

Article about some data sources to use:
https://www.powerapps911.com/post/what-is-the-best-data-source-for-power-apps

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Chriddle 8,443 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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If your "Integer" is just a synonym for "ID", check the guid() function.

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