Trouble Populating Word Document Template (CDS to Flow)

[poweruser132564]

I am building a Portal and am attempting to make a flow, triggered by a form, that will populate a word document template.

When attempting to fill the Word document, I notice that some of the form's fields are listed as _label instead of their original field names. This is the case for fields with drop down lists and dates. Other fields, such as currency and date types, do not appear to be listed in the output portion. When I run the Flow, currency and date fields appear as NULL.

Does anyone know where these output names are listed? Is there any way for me to see the "Output" column name of Common Data Service fields that are not explicitly listed in the "Body" of the flow?

I notice that when I use 'Variable'_label I can manually pull fields in, but not all fields are appearing in this case.

[poweractivate]

@poweruser132564 

Best is either a) to remember this pattern for Option Set (now called a Choice field) or b) just look at it in Power Automate using dummy actions to get the properties you need.

Reason is because, to our awareness these are not defined as specific properties. They are related with the underlying API and Backend of Dataverse.

For example if you were to issue something like this query using Dataverse Web API:

You would get something like this as result:

In this example above, which by the way uses the Out-of-the-Box (OOB) Relationship Type Choice Column (formerly called a Field) of Account Table (formerly called an Entity) you may notice that:

customertypecode@OData.Community.Display.V1.FormattedValue

 
This is not defined as far as we know, as a specific column in Dataverse, it is something that happens when the underlying API is used. Therefore there is probably no other way to inspect these types of metadata unless you either just memorize it or just try it every time in Power Automate like you did there. The use of underscore at the beginning of Power Automate metadata and the naming, is usually consistent among the Option Set (now called Choice) fields (now called columns, so these are called columns with the type "Choice") so it can possibly be memorized. There is no specific reason we know of that Power Automate does it that way other than some convention chosen to translate from the underlying Web API and backend architecture of Dataverse.

Note that the actual value for the column of type "Choice" is the one that is the number.

Note that in the example above, the value (i.e. the number) 3 for customertypecode is the actual underlying value and underlying true column in Dataverse.  When writing changes, it writes to that column - the label is never the actual column value - just so you know as well. If the label is changed for a Choice field, for the same value, that value would remain the same, and it would just relabel any records that may have that value assigned in that record's Choice Column's selected value.

We are inferring from our observation of Dataverse now and over time, we are not familiar with the specific internal way it was made, so we cannot guarantee about if the above is really correct, but it is our inference from our observation.

Check if the above may help.

[poweruser132564]

Thanks for this solution! I found out that there was actually a system issue where the form data wasn't being pushed to CDS. I had to open a ticket with Microsoft to try and get this system issue resolved.