Power Automate

How to pull in Column headers when dataset/body is empty?

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Posted on by CU05121516-0

Hi All,

I'm am running a report that gets sent out every week. I setup a simple flow that:

Queries a dataset in Power BI

Select statement to rename/order columns

Create CSV

Email it out

This works fine but some weeks there just isn't any data when it gets refreshed so the report errors out saying it can't email out an empty dataset. Is there a way to pull in just the Column headers so that the report goes out with just those but no data?

Thanks!

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David_MA 15,079 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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You can use the length expression to determine how many items are returned from your data set (Power Automate length() Function [How to Use] - Enjoy SharePoint). Use a condition with the length expression on the left side of the condition and set it to where it is greater than zero (0). Then put the rest of your actions under the yes side of the condition. When no items are returned, your flow will end.

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CU05121516-0 10 on at

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Thanks for the reply but I think you misunderstood what I am asking. I have a table that gets update weekly and usually it has 5-10 records in it - we'll say its for New Hires. That queries through fine and outputs are pushed to the csv table and all is well - normally. But some weeks there just aren't any new hires. When this happens and the flow runs - it errors out on the Email step I mentioned above saying there is no data in the attachment - can't have that. I want to find a way to still have the column headers come through.

So it normally looks like this:

Name Date Hire Group.

Jim 1/2/25 Accounting

Bob 1/1/25 Electrical

Now if next week there are no people then no data is sent through the PBI Query and nothing gets passed to the CSV action. What I want to see in this case is a CSV file that shows:

Name Date Hire Group

I still want to be able to send that to people so they know there were no hires this past week. How do I do that?

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