Power Automate Fundamentals # 48: Usage of First & Last Function in Power Automate

Introduction:

In Power Platform, for certain business scenarios we must extract first, and last characters of a given string or First and Last items present in an array. First And Last function can be used in power automate to achieve this functionality.

Step 1:

Login to the required Power Apps environment using URL make.powerapps.com by providing username and password and click on Flows on the left-hand side as shown in the below figure.

Step 2:

After Step 1, Click on New Flow and select instant cloud flow and provide the trigger as Manually trigger a flow and click on Create as shown in the below figure.

Step 3:

After Step 2, name the flow as First And Last Function and take a parallel branch and one side of branch take an initialize variable and name it as Initialize variable – Array- Set List Of Contacts and provide values

Name: ContactsList

Type: Array

Value: [“Venkata”,”Polisetty”,”Subbarao”]

as shown in the below figure.

Step 4:

After Step 3, to the other side of  parallel branch take another initialize variable and name it as Initialize variable – String – User Name and provide values

Name: UserName

Type: String

Value: Venkata

as shown in the below figure.

Step 5:

After Step 4, now under Initialize variable – Array- Set List Of Contacts take a compose action and name it as First Function Array and provide the inputs with first  function which returns the first element in the array or string passed with the following syntax

first(collection: array|string)

as

Inputs : first(variables(‘ContactsList’))

as shown in the below figure.

Step 6:

After Step 5, now under Initialize variable – String – User Name take a compose action and name it as First Function on String User Name and provide the inputs as

Inputs : first(variables(‘UserName’))

as shown in the below figure.

Step 7:

After Step 6, under First Function Array action take new action and name it as Last Function Array and provide inputs as

Inputs : last(variables(‘ContactsList’))

Step 8:

After Step 7, under First Function on String User Name action take new action and name it as Last Function on String User Name and provide inputs as

Inputs : last(variables(‘UserName’))

Step 9:

After Step 8, save and test the flow and observe results as shown in the below figure.

Note:

1. Make sure to save and run the flow whenever you try expressions.
2. Make sure to provide input array in proper acceptable format of string array.
3. Also use double quotes for the elements in the array.

Conclusion: In this way we can use first and last function in power automate to achieve customer functionality.