Creating a Lead for every ClickDimensions Posted Form using Power Automate

Recently, my good friend Megan Walker did a guest post for ClickDimensions showing how to create a Lead for every ClickDimensions Posted Form and if you haven’t read it then you really should!

When I was reading this post one of the things I noticed was the requirement to use a Filter Array step and Compose step for each question in your Form in order to be able to use them when you created the Lead. This approach works perfectly, but it could be quite time consuming to create if your Form has lots of questions, so I wondered if there could be a way to simplify it a little bit.

Please note, for the purposes of this post I’m only going to be focusing on an alternative way to get the Posted Field data and use it to create your Lead, Megan has covered everything else in her post so please read it!

If you’d prefer to watch a video overview of this blog, click here.

The Solution

The first step is still to List your Posted Fields using the List Records action. If you’re using the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector then you’ll be able to select the specific attributes you want returned. In this case we’re only interested in the Label (i.e. the Question) and the Value (i.e. the Answer). You should also set the Order By to the Label; this will ensure consistency in the returned results which is important for later steps in the Flow.

If you look at the Output for the List Records action, you’ll see that it gives a JSON array that looks something like:

We want to make matching pairs for the Questions (Labels) and Answers (Values) from each of the returned Posted Fields and combine them in an array. Fortunately for us, in Power Automate there is an Action called Select that allows you to “Select the specified properties from all elements of the ‘From’ array into a new array”. This is really just a fancy way of saying you can take the elements of the output above that you like and keep them, while disregarding the rest, and you can reshape them into pairs as required.

For the Select action, we take the data From the output of the List Records step, and then we create a map of the Label and the Value as a name pair

When this is done, the output from the Select action will look something like this:

This is much better!

As you can see, the Questions and Answers have been combined into array elements. You can also see that, as we set the Order By to the Label in the List Records Step above, the array elements are listed alphabetically. One important thing to note at this stage is that each element in an Array has an index number beginning from 0, so you can identify the array elements I’ve returned above as follows

The final step for creating the Lead is to add a Create a New Record action, and then we’re going to use an expression to pull the values from the output above into the fields we need to populate:

As you can see, for each field we are populating we have an expression with the following format:

@{outputs('Select')['body']?[0]?['Company Name']}

The key things to note in the construction of this expression are:

1. for the Outputs expression, the name ‘Select’ must match the name that you’ve given to the Select step
2. the Integer number [0] must match the element number for the array element as indicated above. For example, if we want to set the Telephone Number we will use [4]
3. The final part of the expression [‘Company Name’] must match the text of the Question from the array.

If we wanted to get the Email Address instead of the Company Name then the expression would be:

@{outputs('Select')['body']?[5]?['Work Email Address']}

After we’ve completed all of the above our flow now only has three actions to retrieve Posted Fields and to create a Lead with the answers submitted:

Conclusions

The first thing to say is that none of this would have been possible without the valuable insights of Megan Walker and Rob Dawson. I keep saying this, but one of my favourite things about this community is the collaborative efforts we all make to help each other.

The second thing is that while this works, if the Questions on your form were to change, either by adding/removing questions or by changing the Label of the questions then this would probably affect the success of the Flow, so it might be worth putting some additional validation logic in to catch any potential issues like that.

The final thing is that Power Automate is so powerful and it’s amazing what you can achieve with some lateral thinking. This has been a fun little challenge for me, and hopefully you find it useful. Please reach out to me if you have any questions or comments.