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Is there a way I can make this flow more efficient?

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Posted on by rmartori

So I created a flow that takes information from a form and sends it to our tracker. The problem I was running into is near the end there is a split question that takes you to a different set of questions depending on what type of work you are doing, Fixed Fee or Time and Materials.

When I first ran the bot I didnt have a condition and just had add row to tables with everything going where it should. The issue was if someone picked say Fixed fee then any time materials questions would be Null, and visa versa.

This caused the bot to error out with the error message to some effect of "Information is Null when string is expected.

So I added the condition to route it to a different spot depending on if it is T&M or not, per the below screenshot.

Is there anyway That I can skip this condition? Someone asked for help doing something similar for their form but there form is a whole lot more complex multiple exclusive paths instead of just one way to many to put a condition for each conceivable possibility.

All of those Composes are just a weird formatting thing I needed to do to create that secure id Basically is there a way where I could for example just go through every null and just make it a space? that way I dont need the condition. It works for my small form but the big form a friend needs to deal with it wouldnt work for.

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Building flows

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Sayan 818 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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To handle cases where fields might be null and avoid conditional routing based on exclusive paths in your form, you can use the "Coalesce" function in Power Automate. The Coalesce function returns the first non-null value from a list of arguments, allowing you to replace null values with a default value like a space.

Here’s how you can modify your flow to handle null values without using multiple conditions:

Initialize Variables:

Initialize variables for each form field where null values might occur.

Type: String

Set Variables with Coalesce:

Use the "Coalesce" function to set each variable, providing a space or another default value if the field is null.

Expression :

coalesce(triggerOutputs()?['body/FixedFee'], ' ')
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If my suggestion helps you, please gives it a Like and Marks as a Solution. Which motivates to solve more problems.

Thanks,

Sayan Patra

RPA Developer

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rmartori on at

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With the coalesce expression

coalesce(triggerOutputs()?['body/FixedFee'], ' ')

Would I need to make one for both fixed fee and T&M?

Or is there a way to do this without basing it off of either of those?

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