Text() Function not Working as Expected

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Posted on by WillPage

2,339 Super User 2026 Season 1

I've been developing Power Apps long enough to know what the expected output of this should be, and it's not that:

I need to pad the value of this input box out to 12 digits with leading zeros but the output is a numeric value, as this snip from the monitor demonstrates:

Green text with no quotes in the JSON is certainly not text. I even defined it as such in my custom connector set up:

Can Power Apps be a little less buggy for me just this once, pretty please 🙏?

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DP_Prabh 381 on at

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Hi @WillPage,

Just making a guess please try this:
"" & Text(Value(Self.Value), "000000000000")
adding empty string will lock it as string, i guess and pad the value with leading zeroes and then value from JSON.

I have tested it by creating a collection and on text box used this formula

and output is like

I hope this works for you!

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11manish 3,333 on at

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The issue is not your padding logic—it’s that Microsoft Power Apps converts the value back to a number when sending it to the connector.

Best Fix (Use this)

Force the value to stay as text:

"" & Text(Self.Value, "000000000000")

Why this works

Text() formats the number

"" & forces string type during API serialization

Prevents Power Apps from converting it back to a number

Recommended usage

Set(
varParentWorkOrderId,
"" & Text(Self.Value, "000000000000")
);

Then pass varParentWorkOrderId to your connector.

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WillPage 2,339 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Thanks @11manish and @DP_Prabh - concatenating with an empty string is a suitable workaround to force the output as text. I've been developing Power Apps professionally for about 8 years and I've never had the Text() function simply ignore what I'm trying to do before, but thankfully this workaround is successful.

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