Post #9 of our Build Flows Faster series covering our new Utility actions for Power Automate. We will publish more posts and accompanying videos over the coming weeks, but today’s post is about concatenating multiple text values into a single text value.
Our utility actions are targeted at helping you build flows more quickly with less complexity, and they brilliantly only use 0.05 actions from your Encodian subscription allowance. For example, under a standard plan that permits 500 actions per month (uses), you could use the utility actions 10,000 times!
Introducing the ‘Concatenate Text’ Utility Action
The ‘Concatenate Text‘ utility action accepts an array of text values that concatenates (or joins) to form a single text value, optionally with a specified delimiter.
Video Guide: Concatenate multiple text values in Power Automate
Instructions: Concatenate multiple text values in Power Automate
Consider the following scenario: I have a SharePoint document library where PDF documents are saved. I need to identify any URLs contained within a document upon adding to the library and then save the value(s) to a SharePoint column named ‘URLs‘
The following steps will add this capability to the existing flow depicted above:
1. Add the Encodian ‘Get PDF Text Layer‘ action underneath the SharePoint ‘Get file content‘ action
1.a. Filename: Select the ‘File name with extension‘ property provided by the SharePoint ‘When a file is created (properties only)‘ trigger action
1.b. File Content: Select the ‘File Content‘ property provided by the SharePoint ‘Get file content‘ action
The Encodian ‘Get PDF Text Layer‘ will extract all the text contained within the PDF document provided, returned as a text (string) value.
2. Add the Encodian ‘Utility – Extract URLs from Text‘ utility action beneath the Encodian ‘Get PDF Text Layer‘ action
2.a. Text: Select the ‘Text Layer‘ property provided by the Encodian ‘Get PDF Text Layer‘ action
The Encodian ‘Utility – Extract URLs from Text‘ utility action will return an array of URLs contained within the ‘Result‘ property, and given we need to update the SharePoint column with a single text value we need to do some extra processing to concatenate each URL in the array to a single text value! use the Encodian ‘Utility – Concatenate Text‘ action for this purpose!
3. Add the Encodian ‘Utility – Concatenate Text‘ utility action beneath the Encodian ‘Utility – Extract URLs from Text‘ utility action
3.a. Click the ‘Switch to input to entire array‘ button
3.b. Text Values: Select the ‘Result‘ property provided by the Encodian ‘Utility – Extract URLs from Text‘ utility action
3.d. Delimiter: Enter ‘, ‘
4. Update the SharePoint ‘Update file properties‘ action
4.a. URLs: Select the ‘Result‘ property provided by the Encodian ‘Utility – Concatenate Text‘ action
The flow will execute every time a new document is added to the SharePoint library:
And the contained URL’s will be added to the ‘URLs‘ SharePoint column:
If you require further advice or support regarding Encodian utility actions, please email our support team at support@encodian.com. As always, the team would be delighted to help.
