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shands
New Member

Looking for simple way to store variable values between flow execution

Just starting with desktop automation and have some simple flows running for my users.  I am looking an easy way to pass variable values between daily flows.  I am thinking that reading/writing to a txt or csv file will be straight forward.  Are there other methods I should consider?  Can anybody recommend a tutorial, video or example flow I can use as a pattern?

 

Thanks for your suggestions!

2 ACCEPTED SOLUTIONS

Accepted Solutions
MichaelAnnis
Super User
Super User

You can “set environment variables” in one flow and these can be picked up from another flow with “get environment variables”.  So, if it’s always the same variables and the flows are always ran in the same order, this is very effective. 

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VJR
Multi Super User
Multi Super User

Hi @shands 

 

Here is a video on using environment variables in Power Automate Desktop

096 - Using Windows Environment Variables in Power Automate Desktop - YouTube

 

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8 REPLIES 8
MichaelAnnis
Super User
Super User

You can “set environment variables” in one flow and these can be picked up from another flow with “get environment variables”.  So, if it’s always the same variables and the flows are always ran in the same order, this is very effective. 

----
If my post has answered your question, please thumbs up and mark this post as a solution.

I also offer paid consulting services. If you would like to discuss this option, please feel free to DM me and we can set up a time to join a Zoom call and fix any issues you are having.

Excellent input. Thanks.

VJR
Multi Super User
Multi Super User

Hi @shands 

 

Here is a video on using environment variables in Power Automate Desktop

096 - Using Windows Environment Variables in Power Automate Desktop - YouTube

 

Watched the video.  Very useful.  Thanks for your help!

VJR
Multi Super User
Multi Super User

You are good to close the thread now :).

Not many know but there is an option also to mark multiple posts as an answer if you think those have helped you in getting an answer. 

Good day!

When I first started using PAD, I really didn't understand a lot of best practices and so that led me to reworking and refining a lot of my flows several times. In the end, that first automation project ended up having a few primary flows and since there were common activities they all shared, some child processes were saved as independent desktop flows, like a global child flow if you will. All the flows were sharing variables between them with ease. No environmental variables, no saving things to text files or spreadsheets, no putting things on the clipboard momentarily... it just worked, seamlessly.

 

That was all great and well until my next project where I could not recreate the same experience. No matter what configuration of output/input variables I tried would get the child flow to pass the variable back to the calling flow. After hunting through documentation and YouTube videos and forums for several hours I came up with basically nothing.

 

This is where it gets interesting. I should have thought of it sooner, lack of experience I guess, but I finally remembered that you can copy actions and paste them into notepad to see the underlying code. I did that to both the flow where the variables were getting passed and compared it to the one where they were not and this is what I found:

This is the code for the action in the new flow where it is not passing the variable:

 

@@flowname: 'Child_Flow'
External.RunFlow FlowId: '########-####-####-####-############'

 

And this is the code from my old flow where it is still working perfectly:

 

@@flowname: 'Child_Flow'
External.RunFlow FlowId: '########-####-####-####-############' @Var_Name=> Var_Name

 

So once I added it as an output variable to the child flow (won't work without that piece) and manually added it to piece of code in notepad with the same syntax as the working flow, then copied/pasted that back into the new flow and everything worked perfectly!

 

I'm fairly decent at reverse-engineering things but I don't have the depth of programming knowledge to explain what is going on and why this works; maybe someone who knows more can shed some light on that. Either way, it's working for now.

Agnius
Most Valuable Professional
Most Valuable Professional

This is because the interface for Run desktop flow related to input/output variables has been bugged after a recent update, and you need to resort to things like that to make it work. We hope MS will fix it soon.

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Regards, Agnius Bartninkas

Ah, so I was on track in thinking something wasn't quite right. Thanks for the follow up!

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