Flow - Allow variable mutation / manipulation

Moved from Azure DevOps (ref: #2992)...

Developer estimate: 15 days

Gus asked about being able to manipulate variable values for example, see below.

Allow variable value mutation

All variable names have to be unique and internal are referenced by and unique-ID (guid) as the flow gets more complex you find that you want to mutate variables in different branches of the flow.

[Todo] All variable owners have a new property VariableRef this is exclusive OR with Variable Owner

[Todo] Validate VariableRef types flow the same i..e type changes are invalid

[Todo] new action DeclareVariable to allow variable declaration at the top of the flows etc.

More from Gus

One thing I found particularly annoying this morning was when using the When action to call an HTTP Get for 3 different scenarios (To get news articles back), admittedly this might actually become less of an issue when we get the variables to be on the URL of the HTTP GET, but possibly will still be an issue.

Scenario is to be able to use the When action to drive different HTTP GETs (or a POST) which returns values back. In my case it is the same API call but different values on the URL, then you do the Variable extraction to new variables which you want to use later in the flow. So each JSON Assignment for each case will extract info to the same variable name depending on the which Case it went down in the When Action.

Trouble is at present you have to have unique variable names in each of the Case actions. So this means I can not have one set actions after I have done my HTTP gets depending on which choice I went down, you end up with a load of variables that effectively are the same ones.

Hope this makes sense – but you can see what I mean in the Assistant Get Latest News in my tenant.

-- More complex manipulation for later

mathematical, Add, subtract etc.

string: Concatenation, Replace