5 tips for the New Designer in Power Automate (Web)

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Tips for using Power Automate (Web)
Despite the new flow designer in Power Automate going live several months ago, there are still “features” (read bugs) that can cause confusion. This blog covers 5 of these quirks, showing a way to deal with each.

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 04 April 2024

In this blog

Tip 1 - Getting your parallel branches to converge
Tip 2 - Creating virtual field names for SharePoint list columns
Tip 3 - Showing a full list of the available triggers when creating a flow
Tip 4 - Missing dynamic options
Tip 5 - The Body/Value error

I'm sure eventually the new flow editor in Power Automate will make life easier, but at the moment it throws up a number of inconsistencies (that's a deliberate euphemism). This blog shows how to get round 5 of these.

What makes the new flow designer particularly frustrating is that these inconsistencies can vary from one day to the next, as Microsoft silently fix some bugs while inadvertently creating others.

Tip 1 - Getting your parallel branches to converge

Splitting your code into parallel branches can be a useful technique for speeding up your code:

The tricky part is when you wan them to reform a single flow

A typical parallel branch.

The tricky part (with the new flow designer, at any rate) comes when you want then to combine your paths back into a single flow. To do this, select the first action which you want to be part of a recombined single flow:

Select the first task which should belong to both paths.

Now go to the Settings for this task:

With the above task selected, choose Settings.

You can now tell Power Automate to run this task when either of the paths above completes:

The old designer allowed click and drag, which may or may not return!

Tip 2 - Creating virtual field names for SharePoint list columns

When creating a SharePoint list using import, Power Automate replaces the names of columns with an internal name:

Title is the first column, but subsequent columns are named field_0, field_2, etc.

Using a SELECT action you can create new column names without having to use the encoded names.

You can now reference the new names output from this SELECT action in subsequent actions in this flow.

In fairness to the new flow designer, this feature was also present in the old one.

Tip 3 - Showing a full list of the available triggers when creating a flow

When you first create a new triggered flow you only see a subset of the avaialble triggers:

This doesn’t include all of the options!

Instead choose Skip in the dialog box above, then click Add a trigger:

Click this button to see more options.

You can now enjoy an expanded list of options.

All of the options moved across from the old editor appear in this list.

Tip 4 - Missing dynamic options

This is one of the most inconsistent bugs. The dynamic options for field completion sometimes go missing:

You will experience this irritating bug most frequently when multiple fields require the dynamic input (such as when creating a new row in a table, as here).

If an option is missing, try using the expression editor and selecting Dynamic content:

You can now see the full list of choosable dynamic values.

Note that this doesn’t work when referencing the output of an action such as Filter Array or Select.

Tip 5 - The Body/Value error

This error will shatter the confidence of new learners, making you question your sanity!

Selecting Body in a previous action generates a missing Body/Value error.

Certain actions like Get Tables, Filter Array and Select only output a Body section, yet Power Automate replaces these with Body/Value: