Power Automate has added a number of new expression functions and features recently. This time around I’ll take a look at three of those new functions: chunk, sort and reverse. The chunk function lets you break up strings or arrays into blocks of equal length. The format is as follows: […]
Tag: Function Friday
Function Friday – Xpath
Power Automate doesn’t give you any built-in methods for editing XML content, and that’s fine. XML is a devil-spawned file format that should die thousands of deaths and never see the light of day again. But, if you’re forced to use XML and need the ability to search and parse […]
Function Friday – Coalesce
I had intended to cover the XML XPath function this week. But due to some time constraints I needed to make this a quick hit this week, so I’m going over the coalesce function instead. The coalesce function is quite simple. You pass in any number of arguments and coalesce […]
Function Friday – JSON Manipulation
Apologies for the delay. It’s been a rough few weeks lately. A lot of the work we do as developers is to pass data back and forth. Typically these days that data is passed in JSON format (though the usage of XML is still fairly widespread). Sometimes we need to […]
Function Friday – URI Parsing Functions
Sometimes you need to work with URI (uniform resource identifiers) in Power Automate. URIs point at something, like websites, files, and so forth. You should be familiar with their most common format, the URL (uniform resource locator): The first portion (“https”) identifies the protocol or scheme. The second portion (“barretblake.dev”) […]
Function Friday – Date and Time Wrap Up: Timezones and Ticks
This time I’m walking through the remaining Date and Time functions. These include the functions that convert between and work with timezones: convertFromUtc, convertToUtc, convertTimeZone, utcNow. But first, we’re going to take a look at ticks. Just what the heck are ticks, anyway? Ticks are an integer value that represents […]
Function Friday – More Date and Time Fun: startOf and dayOf
Previously I’ve walked through how to do some date math, formatting, and parsing. Now I’ll drill into a few of the other date and time functions around getting certain values related to a particular date and time. There are three functions that are closely related: dayOfMonth, dayOfWeek, dayOfYear. All three […]
Function Friday – Formatting and Parsing Dates and Times
This week I’m looking at formatting and parsing date and time values in Power Automate. This can be a great pain when working with data in your functions for a straightforward reason: DateTime values come in many different formats. And different systems will require different formats for your DateTime values. […]
Function Friday: Date and Time Addition
This time I’m going to start delving into the date and time functions of Power Automate. Date and time is one of the most painful parts of working with flows. The reason for that is that sometimes a DateTime value is a DateTime, sometimes it’s a number, and sometimes it’s […]
Function Friday: Data Type Conversion Functions – Arrays, JSON and XML
This time we’re wrapping up the last of the data type conversion functions. We’ll cover the more complex data types: arrays, JSON, and XML. array The array function creates an array from a single input data element. The format is simple: And as an example: To be honest, there’s no […]