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Why does this return False

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Posted on by PiminMaito

Hey All,

Surely a very silly question, but in my flow that runs hourly, at certain times of day i use an IF statement to check the time, and if condition is met, the flow has to perform some additional steps.

In the example from the run below at 2300 UTC, start of hour condition equals to TRUE, but the OR statement returns FALSE - does anyone know why this is? My understanding of OR, if any of the conditions returns true, the whole expression should return true.

Any thoughts what I could be missing here.

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Haque 3,249 on at

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Hi @PiminMaito,

I suspect your compasions giving trouble, your understanding is correct of Or operation. Here are some points we need to consider on your logical checks:

Global Statement: In Boolean Algebra logic, OR should return true if any condition is true. I see, in your run, one of the comparisons (startOfHour(...) = 23) clearly evaluates to true. Yet the overall OR block shows false.

Extract the hour explicitly - to make it INTEGER

int(formatDateTime(startOfHour(utcNow()), 'HH'))

Now let's compare:

Condition 1: int(...) = 8

Condition 2: int(...) = 15

Condition 3: int(...) = 23

OR block will now evaluate correctly, because all comparisons are of the same type.

Note: How your logic is treated:

startOfHour(...) returns a datetime value (e.g., 2026-03-20T23:00:00Z), not just the number 23. When you compare that to "23", "08", "15", the designer UI shows the individual comparison as “True” (because it coerces the values for display).

I am sure some clues I tried to give. If these clues help to resolve the issue brought you by here, please don't forget to check the box Does this answer your question? At the same time, I am pretty sure you have liked the response!

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Chriddle 8,697 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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The correct condition result is False, because you compare Strings with Integers.

The result of the expression is a String but if you write a number into Dynamic content, it's a number.

Check this:

startOfHour(outputs('Compose'), 'HH')

equals(startOfHour(outputs('Compose'), 'HH'), 23)

equals(startOfHour(outputs('Compose'), 'HH'), '23')

Result:

The new Designer is clearly making a mistake here.

I assume that the value "False" comes from the server-side evaluation, while the value "True" from the last condition is only calculated (falsely) in the designer.

To solve your issue, enter an expression:

string(23)

instead of just 23

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PiminMaito 12 on at

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thank you both for giving me the pointers and Chriddle for acknowledging the issue with the new designer - that threw me off.

I will try again!

here a small edit by the way, 08 worked fine.

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Chriddle 8,697 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Yes, the dynamic value 08 is interpreted as a string because of the starting 0.

You can verify this at any time in the code view (by checking for quotation marks).

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