Unable to process template language expressions in action

[ivanalvarez]

Dear all,

This is my first post in the Microsoft Power Automate Community Forum and I hope anyone can help me.

Currently I am working in a small project for my job through which I want to fetch specific data from PDFs using AI Builder and input this data into an excel table (Later on I will  input the data into a legacy system using a Desktop flow). 

The issue is that the dates in the PDFs are in format "dd-Mon-yyyy" when I need "dd-MM-yyyy". So, instead of 02-Jun-2023 I need 02-06-2023. The PDFs I work with are hedge trade confirmations, with:

1. Trade Date

2. Effective Date

3. Maturity Date

One collection of PDFs I trained has only Trade and Effective Date and the other collection Trade and Maturity Date. So, for example, if I want to fetch information from a PDF which only contains Trade and Effective Date (But not Maturity Date), the flow I created works until it reaches the action that you can see below, with the error message:

It looks like if variable created through the AI Builder action doesn't exist in a specific document (being null) the flow gives this error. I tried several things, like adding a conditional, but I couldn't insert the "Initialize variable 3" in it because this kind of action is not allowed.

Could someone help me to solve this problem? Happy to provide more information if needed.

Thanks in advance

Iván

[v-xiaochen-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @ivanalvarez ,

We cannot use action 'Initialize variable' in the loop , but we can use 'set variable' in it.

Sample:

Best Regards,

Wearsky

[CedrickB]

Hi,

It looks like you are trying to perform some conversion logic in the variable initialization.

So if the data retrieved is empty, then it will fail.

Did you consider using the new typed fields feature to perform this conversion instead?

See https://learn.microsoft.com/ai-builder/extract-dates-and-numbers 

[ivanalvarez]

Thanks for your message Wearsky. This solution doesn't work since it's not possible to perform a conversion logic within a variable initialization action when the data retrieved is empty, as the answer below states.

[Antoine2F]

The idea of Wearsky is to initialize variable first, with a default value (blank), even before running AI Builder model.

Then you use a condition to set this variable to the AI Builder output or not, depending on the value of AI Builder output.

[v-xiaochen-msft]

Hi @ivanalvarez ,

Not sure if I understood the issue correctly.

---

like adding a conditional, but I couldn't insert the "Initialize variable 3" in it because this kind of action is not allowed.

---

My solution works when using variables in conditions.

If I misunderstood, could you share screenshots, formulas and running results?

Best Regards,

Wearsky

[ivanalvarez]

Hi Cedrick, thanks for your message. 

Indeed, you summarized pretty well my issue. However, I am not sure whether I am able to use the new typed fields feature. As you can see in the screenshot below, I can only select among these 3 options regarding the order but I cannot customize the format further.

Best,

Iván

[CedrickB]

As mentioned in the documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/ai-builder/extract-dates-and-numbers#supported-date-formats we support several date formats.

For instance, selecting "Year, Month, Date" is supposed to capture automatically either 1-18-2020 or 01Aug2020 or 01/08/2020 ... without having to provide more details on the format.

[ivanalvarez]

I understand. The dates in the documents I am using to extract data are in the format 01-Aug-2020 but what I want to be input in the Excel file is 01-08-2020. So my problem is not how to fetch the data but how to convert it to the format I want.

[ivanalvarez]

Hello again @v-xiaochen-msft @Antoine2F 

I tried this using the following expressions: 

For the condition: empty(outputs('Extract_information_from_forms')?['body/responsev2/predictionOutput/labels/Maturityc082e397ab463c42215830fd94504a91/value'])

For setting the variable if the condition applies: 

formatDateTime(parseDateTime(outputs('Extract_information_from_forms')?['body/responsev2/predictionOutput/labels/Maturityc082e397ab463c42215830fd94504a91/value']), 'dd-MM-yyyy', 'en-GB')

And the result:

[ivanalvarez]

Hello all, the solution that @v-xiaochen-msft provided apparently worked. I had made a mistake in the way of setting up the condition and corrected it to this: 

Thank you all!

[CedrickB]

As mentioned in the documentation, whatever the input format is, you get a normalized format at the end YYYY-MM-DD.

Unless I'm mistaken Excel supports this kind of format so you should be good to go without having to perform any conversion logic in Power Automate.