Mastering Power Automate: A Comprehensive Guide to Flattening Nested Arrays #PowerAutomate #Tutorial

Welcome to today's tutorial on how to efficiently flatten or explode nested arrays in Power Automate. In this video, we'll cover advanced techniques that involve the use of my favourite action, "Select," and some string manipulation methods.

We'll start by understanding the structure of a nested array and how we can transform it into a new array, where each object corresponds to a unique product ID. Traditionally, this process would involve using nested 'apply to each' loops, but we'll explore a more efficient approach that can handle large data sets without consuming excessive API calls.

During the course of the video, I will demonstrate two different techniques: a traditional one using nested apply to eaches and a more advanced one using string manipulation and the select action. The latter technique only requires six actions and is scalable to work across massive data sets.

Finally, I will show you how this data can be written into an Excel table, ensuring the correct transformation and organization of the data.

Remember, this technique can also be used with data from various sources such as Dataverse, SharePoint, or third-party APIs.

[00:00] Introduction: Overview of the tutorial on how to efficiently flatten or explode nested arrays in Power Automate.

[00:49] Understanding the requirements of a nested array: Dive into the structure of a nested array and discuss the transformation process into a new array where each object corresponds to a unique product ID.

[03:42] A basic flow with nested apply to each: Demonstration of the traditional method of using nested 'apply to each' loops to flatten or explode arrays.

[05:23] Using Select and stringified JSON for an efficient flow: Introduction to a more advanced technique using the Select action and string manipulation methods. This technique only requires six actions and is scalable to work across massive data sets.

[17:40] Writing data to Excel: Show how the transformed data can be written into an Excel table, ensuring the correct organization of the data.

[18:50] Learn about writing data to Excel efficiently: Discussion on how to write data to excel efficiently using either the Graph API or Office Scripts.

[19:50] Join data efficiently: Introduction to an efficient way to join arrays without using an apply to each loop.

[20:30] Outro: Wrapping up the tutorial, encouraging viewers to like, subscribe, and leave their thoughts in the comment section.

#PowerAutomate #JSON #PowerPlatform #Tutorial #Efficiency

[ricardobunge]

This is absolutely BRILLIANT! We just had a use-case last week with nested loops - looking forward to using this technique to banish such abominations... 😂

In all seriousness, though, thanks for sharing. I don't know how the inspiration comes to you for these things, but please keep them coming!

[Untethered]

So fun and the join with pipes is very creative!

[keithbrown]

Thanks for always showing us a faster way! I'm going to have to rebuild a few flows...

[jamesclark]

😀 Awesome video Damien! I love Select!

[TheCarterGaming]

Love it. This is similar to what I messaged you about on reddit. Now you should do a video on when you need to pull the nest array values for a multi-lookup sharepoint column; when sharepoint has all that ID, Value, etc and you want to flatten just the value.

[oyvus]

Holy smokes. I was thinking about writing to you with some entangled JSON, but now I don't have to. That is excellent service 13/10 for that service 😅

Liked and Subscribed👍 👏🔥🚀 Thanks Damien!

[noodlebrains]

Great video, I was looking at a way to combine the data from an apply to each loop into a new array of data which can be used in the update a row action (since each sheet in the apply to each loop has a different column and needs to merge into a main sheet with all columns). The apply to each loop to update row is currently deleting data if the column doesn’t exist in one of the files in the loop. So can I do an append to variable linked to current item like you did 4min into video and use a combined new array to update row