How to set a variable as Null if the user does not provide any value

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Posted on 3 Jan 2020 05:23:40 by ankit3

Hi,

I have made a bot that asks a bunch of questions and then using the variables calls flow to send an email. The problem is that some variables are optional for the user (the chat flow is made like that) and when some variables are not provided, the flow call is executed and the questions are asked again.

Is there any way to assign variable a null value?

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ankit3 12 on 07 May 2020 at 01:01:32

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Re: How to set a variable as Null if the user does not provide any value

Can you post a video please?
ankit3 12 on 14 Apr 2020 at 00:43:49

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Re: How to set a variable as Null if the user does not provide any value

That sounds complex but good. Can you please share a video?
dougmaloney 59 on 13 Apr 2020 at 02:50:28

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Re: How to set a variable as Null if the user does not provide any value

I've found a solution to this which works, but ... It's complicated.

I use an Excel online spreadsheet as temporary storage for my variables, keyed off a guid which is generated by an action at the top of the PVA flow.

The same action returns a set of default values for the variables which might be unset/null.

Every time a question is asked in the PVA flow, I call another action either with the value of the variable OR for all other cases, the default value. This action stores the values in the spreadsheet.

At the end of my flow I have yet another action which uses the original guid to retrieve the correct row and values from the spreadsheet.

It took some thought, and some time to setup, but it does work.
If it's going to be helpful I'll post a video of how I did it.
ankit3 12 on 09 Apr 2020 at 01:44:08

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Re: How to set a variable as Null if the user does not provide any value

I haven't found the solution yet. I've reached out to Microsoft team and they suggested to use "Receive request from Power Virtual Agent" in Power Automate but that doesn't work as well. I'll post the solution here once I get the final resolution.
dougmaloney 59 on 09 Apr 2020 at 01:38:42

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Re: How to set a variable as Null if the user does not provide any value

Did you find a solution for this ? I have the same problem.

Prompt the user "Were you born in Australia or Overseas" (multiple choice).
If they answer "Overseas" PVA prompts "Please enter the country you were born in" (text).
Call action, passing the variables from both prompts.
If the customer selects "Australia" in the first prompt, it means the second prompt is not issued, and the resulting variable is not assigned.

When I come to call my action in 3, PVA prompts for the missing variable "Please enter the country you were born in" BEFORE calling the action. The receiving action has that variable set as "optional".

I've tried a few workarounds including assigning the missing variable using another different action, but I run into the same problem when it returns.
ankit3 12 on 05 Jan 2020 at 22:22:08

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Re: How to set a variable as Null if the user does not provide any value

Thanks for your reply.

Attaching screenshot of the PVA where I'm calling flow. You can see there are around 8 variables. The flow is executed perfectly if all 8 all present but of user chooses not to provide the "CompanyName", the flow is not executed and user is asked to provide "CompanyName" again. What I'm asking is that, is there any way I can identify if a variable is empty and if yes, assign "Null" to it so that flow can be executed?

PVA.PNG
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Ashish2012 478 on 03 Jan 2020 at 21:38:35

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Re: How to set a variable as Null if the user does not provide any value

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Virtual-Agents-Forum/Conditition-to-test-a-variable-for-an-empty-string/m-p/430063#M475
CU22081450-0 Most Valuable Professional on 03 Jan 2020 at 09:59:14

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Re: How to set a variable as Null if the user does not provide any value

Hi @ankit3 ,

Can you take some pictures of your scenario?

But side your pictures, you can see if this topic help you: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Virtual-Agents-Forum/Conditition-to-test-a-variable-for-an-empty-string/m-p/430063#M475
The solution is: "[...] are you trying to handle a return variable from a flow and do a condition in PVA based on that? I had the same issue and I had to add some logic in the flow to set the value of the variable to "NotFound" and then pass that back into the PVA so that the condition had something to select. Yes i know, workaround to fix a simple feature gap but you know... Let's be agile!"