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Passing Values From Power Automate to Desktop Flow via Text File

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Posted on by Ukiman1014

I have a cloud flow that calls a desktop flow to which I need to pass three text values. Since OneDrive is accessible to both, I'm using the Create File action to create a .txt file in OneDrive with one value per line. The text file is created successfully and looks fine. In Desktop, the Get file content step is only retrieving "Byte [50]".

When I look at Get file content's documentation, it says the output is binary. How can I simply read the text from the file, splitting each line into a variable? Again, this is a text file in OneDrive, it is not local.

Is there a better way to pass text values from cloud to desktop flows?

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Power Automate Desktop

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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Yes, there is. Use Input variables in the desktop flow. They can be added here:

Add an input variable of type text and then, when launching the desktop flow from the cloud flow, the Run a flow built with Power Automate for desktop action will ask you to provide values for the input variables. You can add as many as you want.
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Ukiman1014 on at

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Thank you! I then struggled a bit with getting variables that I passed to the desktop flow into and back from PowerShell. I learned that I can pass multiple variables into PowerShell, but only get one out. Well, there's the main output variable and then another one containing any errors.
Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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Yes, the Run PowerShell script action only supports returning a single variable as output. You can return a JSON blob though and convert it to an object in PAD using the Convert JSON to custom object action, if you want several output values.
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