Is the Flow Editor getting less user friendly?

[NickDewitt]

The Flow Editor seems to get less user friendly each time I use it.

The Type filtering has made things really annoying, to the point that nullable strings don't show in the Dynamic Content list when you are in a string field, and for some reason the Subject field and Body field of the Send and Email V2 show vastly different fields in the Dynamic Content list. Half the time now the only way you can get things in is by typing them into the Expression editor.

This is compounded by the fact that when you click an expression in the in-line editor it doesnt reload the definition into the Expression box anymore, so you have to type it all out again!

What happened to the "see more" button? I'm all for type safety, but making it this difficult to even see the fields that you have available just make the whole thing really really annoying to work with.

By all means warn me about type safety, but don't just hide it all away completely, it's really frustrating!

[v-bacao-msft]

Hi @NickDewitt ,

Thanks for your feedback, if you want to make your suggestion to improve the Flow Editor user experience, please consider submitting your suggestions in Flow ideas forum:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Flow-Ideas/idb-p/FlowIdeas

Regarding type mismatches that make it impossible to reference the expected Dynamic content, have you tried using Compose to get the expected Dynamic content first, then populate Compose's output into the specified field?

In addition to See more, sometimes we can type the name of Dynamic content directly in the search box to get it.

Thanks again for your support again, we look forward to your feedback to MS Flow to give more users a better experience.

Best Regards,

[NickDewitt]

Hey, i'm not sure it's a feature request as what used to work does not work anymore; call me old-school but I always thought of those problems as bugs, even if they were introduced as part of a new feature.

Even in the compose, not only now does it seem impossible to use the expression builder to use formatDateTime() without manually typing the "items('Apply_to_each')?['new_taskstart']" in manually - it doesnt list any of the fields at all, just the list of items and the "value".

This was not this way a few weeks ago. How your average "citizen developer" would manage to get round this, I have no Idea. I would guess they would just give up.

I'm using the common data service connector here on a pretty simple dynamics entity, an even the subject and title field in the email have different behaviour, even though I would assume they were both strings. Why the different behaviour?

[v-bacao-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @NickDewitt ,

Regarding "just the list of items and the "value", this is the expected result, which seems to be by design.

In general, Dynamic content will display the output of the above action. If the properties contained in this JSON response is fixed, then in Flow, we can see all the properties in the Dynamic content option and reference them.

However, if it is a data source such as Entity or SharePoint list, since they may be added with some custom fields, the properties in the returned body are different, so we can only see list of items and the " Value".

A common workaround is to get the expression corresponding to Dynamic content via peek code and then configure them in the function. Like:

Put the corresponding Dynamic content in a Compose, then click on the peek code and copy.

Image reference:

Best Regards,