Expression: Actions

The “Actions” expression refers to other Actions used within Power Automate. For example, you could use this expression to reference the output of a condition action you used earlier, or any other action.  Using this, you will be able to get the start and end time of the action, the ID, the status, and the general inputs / outputs. If something is missing from the Dynamic Content that you’d like to scrape out, or, if you’d like to pass information about an entire action’s outcome to another workflow or application, this is the way to do it! JSON bundles galore!

You can use the Actions expression by typing Action() and then, inside of the brackets, the name of the action you wish to reference, in apostrophes. For example, action(‘condition’).  It’s important to know the format of the action names. For example, “Create an Approval” must be entered as “Create_an_Approval” – not including the underscores would not work!

Whenever you need to obtain information about a previously run action, that isn’t readily available in Dynamic Content – or perhaps you are collecting batches of information to pass through somewhere else –  it’s time for the Actions() expression to come to the rescue. 

Consider using this expression to obtain information about any failed activities within an Apply to Each loop, so that you can readily retry those items.

For me, this is most used when trying to get statistics around run-times. There is a block of text at the bottom of the actions() JSON that tells you how long the action took to run – it’s start & end times. While this is readily available to us when looking at the run-times from the portal, it may be desirable to create our own dashboards and tracking based on these times to ensure workflow health.