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Triggering a flow from Teams to lookup a word and provide a definition

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Posted on by thearn4

At my workplace, we are very acronym heavy, and maintain a spreadsheet of common acronyms for referencing on our SharePoint site.

It would be great to be able to have a power automate flow triggered by a command in Teams chats (say, someone typing "#define ABCD"), and have a reply automatically posted by looking up the definition of "ABCD" in the acronym spreadsheet.

I know there is a chat bot functionality in power automate, however this feature has not yet been allowed by our IT department.

Can this be achieved using just the standard Teams connectors? Thanks!

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Building flows

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fchopo 8,003 Moderator on at

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Hi @thearn4

You could do the following:

1) When a new channel message is added

2) Check if the content of the message (triggerOutputs()?['body/body']) contains the word "#define"

3) If it's true, remove the word "#define" (replace it by '').

4) Search in the excel file for the acronym (key column -> named column 1 in my sample)

5) Post a message with the content of "column 2" which contains the definition.

I should check what happens if no definition is found, but I Hope that helps!

Ferran

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thearn4 4 on at

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Thank you for the quick reply - I'll try and implement this, and will upvote & accept it once I've tested it. But it makes sense to me.

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thearn4 4 on at

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Unfortunately, this flow completes, but never posts a reply. It turns out the starting conditional always evaluates to False or some reason.

If I switch it from Contains to StartsWith, I get a different error:
'The template language function 'startsWith' expects its first parameter to be of type string. The provided value is of type 'Object'.

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fchopo 8,003 Moderator on at

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Hi @thearn4

Which property are you checking in the if condition? It should be "message content" and not "message". Hope that helps!

Ferran

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