Inputs in Manually trigger a flow

During yesterday’s user group meeting Paul Hunt mentioned an issue with inputs in the manually trigger a flow trigger.

When you use inputs the internal names of the input fields is very technical and this doesn’t help when you build complicated expressions.

In this post an option when these internal names are making life difficult

Inputs in Manual Flows

The input fields that I create in a flow are called Input 1, Input 2 and Input 3

When I run this flow however the internal name is called text_1

In most cases this doesn’t matter too much, but it is ugly. Especially when you work with complicated expressions and you have to refer to field as text_1 rather than the names that you gave your field in the trigger.

How to ‘fix’ these internal names

First I tried to export my flow. Then extract all the files from my .zip file. Edit the definition json file in Visual Studio Code and rezip my file.

This doesn’t work! You will find that on import the zip-file is corrupted and it is nor a type that I have made.

Then I used 7-zip and repeated the same steps but instead of extracting the file I edited the text file inside 7-Zip and I managed to rename the internal names.

I changed all the occurrences of text_1 with inputtext_1 and now I can use this new internal name in my flow and my flow still run successfully.

Pieter Veenstra

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com