Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

I have two SharePoint lists. In each one the Title field has been renamed to "Employee Number".

PPE Requests - where an employee submits a reimbursement request. Employees will likely submit multiple requests until they reach their reimbursement limit.
PPE Inventory - where we track the available balance in $$ for each employee. The Employee Number field requires unique values to ensure there is a single line item for each employee. NO DUPLICATES.

When an employee submits a new Request, I want my flow to find the Employee Number in Inventory and return the value of the Available Balance that I can set as a variable. Later in the flow, I'll need to use that variable to see if they have enough funds for the reimbursement, calculate the NEW available balance, etc.

I found a blog post that has a very similar example and I'm 90% there, but that last 10% is killing me.

1. I've used "Get Items" with a Top Count of 1 (just in case) to return the Inventory list items. This is for a small-ish department, so I'm not super concerned with scalability. I'll be surprised if this list reaches triple digits.

FlowAvailableBalance 1.png

2. I've added a Filter Array to isolate the ONE record for that employee number.

But I'm stumped at returning the value of the "Available Balance" field. I initialized the variable following the post which should have returned the number/currency value of the Available Balance:

json(string(first(body('Filter_array'))))?['Available_Balance']

Every test of the flow works fine, no errors. But the value is blank.

I'll be honest, I have no idea what that expression means or does. I just typed it. But I do know enough to know that my number is an integer, not a string. I tried changing the type to Integer and updating the expression to

json(int(first(body('Filter_array'))))?['Available_Balance']

But then the step failed and I got big red "INVALID" errors. So no dice there.

Please help. This method is the closest I've gotten after several hours of trying, but I am NOT tied to it. So if anyone has a better solution, I'm all ears.

Thanks.

Categories:

Building flows