PA limitation or I don't understand: arrays

[wiredup]

Dear PA community,

Back in my programming days, I was able to create a "blank" array and access that array directly write to it via an index.

Is it possible for me to do the same in PA and how would I go about accessing the array without using the Apply to Each function?

Thank you

[Paulie78]

You cannot easily dimension an array to a particular size (but you can do it). But you can easily access arrays via index.

For example, if I create a compose action and put this into it:

[ "Paul", "John", "Ringo", "George" ]

I can directly access the third element with this code:

outputs('Compose')[2]

The index number is 2 for the 3rd element because the array numbering starts from zero. So you can directly read via an index, but you cannot directly write to an index.

You can use the range expression to initialize an array of numbers and use that to create an array of objects. Using the example above you can do something like this:

This produces an array that is like this:

{
    "body": [
        {
            "Index": 0,
            "Name": "Paul"
        },
        {
            "Index": 1,
            "Name": "John"
        },
        {
            "Index": 2,
            "Name": "Ringo"
        },
        {
            "Index": 3,
            "Name": "George"
        },
        {
            "Index": 4,
            "Name": null
        },
        {
            "Index": 5,
            "Name": null
        },
        {
            "Index": 6,
            "Name": null
        },
        {
            "Index": 7,
            "Name": null
        },
        {
            "Index": 8,
            "Name": null
        },
        {
            "Index": 9,
            "Name": null
        },
        {
            "Index": 10,
            "Name": null
        }
] (and so on)

Does that help at all?

[fchopo]

Hello @wiredup 

Have a look at the following sample:

You can read any item in the array using an expression like variables('your_array')[position] starting from 0 (in this example the result would be "item3").

Hope it helps!

Ferran

[wiredup]

Thank you both @fchopo @Paulie78 for your reply. I know @Paulie78 you have replied to the previous posts.

Basically, I am trying to loop thru each of these and accumulate their total sales: (ID3 & ID5).  As you can see I could have 1 location listed once or listed multiple times depending on when (day) they sold the item.

Thus, I was thinking I'd use an array to store TOTALS for each location ONLY.  I'd assign an index to each location (e.g., 1 for Dumfries and 2 for Fredericksburg) ... then, as sales came in via a loop, I'd just add to an existing total in an array configuration.

Maybe I'm doing this wrong?  In a different approach, I used a loop with previous/current location to write records but it's been tough as some locations have 1 row while others may have 3.

[fchopo · Accepted solution]

Hello @wiredup 

Where does this data come from? Excel? SharePoint?

Regards,

Ferran

[wiredup]

Excel csv 

[fchopo]

Hi @wiredup 

First of all, I would try to Group BY Location, and after that, apply for each item in the group by a sum of the elements. 

You could get an idea from here: Do Group By in Microsoft Flow with two simple elegant loops — John Liu .NET

Hope it helps!

Ferran

[drfixer]

@fchopo!

This is EXACTLY what I was looking for... thank you!