Best way to pass a secret between flows in PAD

[charles_ross_oh]

Sorry if this has been answered - I hunted but the search experience here is not up to Microsoft standards. 

What is the best practice for passing a secret from a desktop flow to a child desktop flow? I am doing it with an output variable, but it's plain text, which to my horror, pops up in a dialog if I run the initial login flow by itself. I guess that's a good thing because I didn't consider my secret was being passed as plain text!

In the child flow, must I re-acquire the credential, or can it somehow be passed downstream as sensitive text? 

[azimzicar]

Hi @charles_ross_oh 

I haven't used this feature in PAD yet, however, anything that you do not want to expose as a string should be encrypted. Have you looked at the cryptography actions? There may be something relevant for you there.

[charles_ross_oh]

Nope, because that's the same amount of trouble as re-acquiring it from the credential store, where it is still encrypted.  Funny thing is, INPUT variables have the sensitive text data type, but not OUTPUT vars. I think this is probably a feature yet to be added.

[Pavel_NaNoi · Accepted solution]

I think you may need to ignore using an output variable as an input into another child flow, the output variables are there mostly for Power Automate Flow (where they get encrypted if needed be), not PAD. use another encrypted input variable as input or just use an encrypted variable. 

[charles_ross_oh]

So my workaround was to re-orient and use an Input Variable and mark it as sensitive secret type.  Thanks for the tip!