Inputs in Manually started workflows

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

Inputs

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

Input internal name

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.

Inputs in Manually trigger a flow Microsoft Office 365 image 31

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.

Inputs in Manually trigger a flow Microsoft Office 365 image 32

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.

Inputs in Manually trigger a flow Microsoft Office 365 somethign went wrong

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.

Inputs in Manually trigger a flow Microsoft Office 365 image 28

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.

Inputs in Manually trigger a flow Microsoft Office 365 image 33

Avatar for Pieter Veenstra

By Pieter Veenstra

Business Applications Microsoft MVP working as the Head of Power Platform at Vantage 365. You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com

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