Flow Designer: How to Loop through a Comma-Separated String

[jmiskey]

I have a Flow that has a Flow Variable whose value is being dynamically built.  Basically, it is building a list of AD Groups to add someone to, based on the answers to a bunch of questions in the Catalog Item.  So when it is complete, it is a String that is structured like this:

AD_Group_1,AD_Group_2,AD_Group_3

I now would like to run a "For Each" action on it, to loop through each of those 3 values.  However, a "For Each" does not want to run against a "String" variable, and you cannot create Flow Variables with an "Array" type. 

So, unless I am missing something, I assume that I somehow need to convert my String into an Array (maybe via a Custom Action)?  What is the easiest way of doing that?  Has anyone come up with the code for that already?  Or is there a different way I can loop through those values in my comma-separated string in Flow Designer?

Thanks

[Zach Koch]

Great! Glad you were able to solve your issue.

[OlaN]

Hi,

Also tested the solution, and by changing the output from the custom action to an Array.String object, I got it working.

[scottl]

Promising? This just shows how poorly implemented SN approach to Flow designer has been, as they never considered the parsing of objects/arrays or even JSON which is a fundamental of programming within it.

So now because Flow designer is so poorly implemented, they've been forced to create some actions to pass basic javascript objects around (programming 101), which BTW these Actions aren't even commented, detailing what it's expecting input and output.

[jmiskey]

Yeah, there definitely are a few things with Flow Designer that they could have done better!  Like provisioning AD access via Azure Spoke versus the Microsoft Spoke.  You actually have to look up the user ID (Guid) and AD group ID (Guid) first, and then add the person using those, instead of just picking the User ID and Azure AD Group name.  I have no idea why they made it so it requires these extra steps instead of working the same way the Microsoft one does...

[scottl]

From what I can tell, SN has become completely compartmentalised with absolutely zero oversight of all the things being developed. Everywhere one looks in SN, everything is different per application, and with zero consistency. 

I'm trying to hook into JIRA, and they cannot even align the spoke actions of what is actually returned in the API it points too. They completely just ignored a large section of the response payload, and now because we have to fix that it's created a maintenance issue moving forward with updating the spoke.