Create a Unique 5 character Identifier

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Posted on by greenawayr

Hi,

We have a naming convention for our documents that contains a 5 character reference.

A-BCDE-RPT-A48FT-00001

The part in bold is what we're looking to generate. We use a SQL stored proc for our on premise environment, I was hoping there might be a similar type of functionality in Power Automate (rather like Excels RAND but with characters too).

We aren't worried about it being able to validate that it is truly unique because the rest of the reference should ensure the overall reference is unique, in the unlikely scenario that those 5 characters would be the same randomly generated.

I thought I'd ask CoPilot to help and that gave me this promising looking function "generateUniqueIdentifier(5)" but alas, when I run it, it's not recognised (thanks CoPilot).

Any thoughts on how to achieve this?

Thanks

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ManishSolanki 15,091 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @greenawayr

In power automate, we have guid function to generate the unique identifier. Pls check out if that is useful for you:

guid()

Output:

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greenawayr 20 on at

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Thanks @ManishSolanki I think that will do the job. I can use the GUID and just trim the last 5 characters off the end using substring. It's not guaranteed to be unique, but it's likely to be and that's the main requirement as uniqueness is offered elsewhere in the Reference.

Thanks

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