Over the years I have noticed several Power Automate expressions that keep coming up during Flow creation. Below are several of them, and a description of what each does. Like the JavaScript 101 code, this article will be updated regularly as more expressions become noticeably useful.
Get the First Item in an Object Returned by Power Automate
This expression allows you to return just the first row of a Flow’s JSON after it has been returned in a retrieval step. Below would be useful if I did a Dataverse Connector for “List Rows” (which normally would return multiple records) but I knew the search criteria would limit the retrieved rows to one record. This will help avoid an “Apply to Each” loop connector.
first(body('Get_Accounts')?['value'])?['aux_accountid']
first(outputs('Get_Accounts')?['body/value'])?['aux_accountid']Add to Time and Add Days
Remember that a date should be in UTC format before using these methods (see below).
addToTime(triggerOutputs()?['body/aux_date'],24,'Month','yyyy-MM-dd')addDays(triggerOutputs()?['body/aux_date'],547)Format a Date
formatDateTime(outputs('Get_Accounts')?['body/aux_date'],'MM-dd-YYYY')Check if an Output Has Records Using Length
The simplest way I have found to check if an output has records is by checking the Length for “NULL.”
length(outputs('{name of step}')?['body/value'])