In this blog post, we’ll learn how to create a button flow in Power Automate using button trigger tokens. Let’s say for example we have an instant flow that we shared with users. When users open up their Power Automate app, they’ll have access to that flow and they can trigger it by clicking a button. They will then be asked for their input such as their address. This address gets to be used in the subsequent flows.
Understanding How A Button Flow Works
By using button trigger tokens, we can get more information about the device that the user is using without asking them to enter any input.
Moreover, if the device has access to their location, then we can just collect that without having the user put it in. It’s very similar to when we go to Google Maps on our phone. It asks us if we want to share our location with Google Maps. If we agree to that, then Google Maps will have access to our location without us having to enter our address.
We can do the same thing in our flows. We can use button trigger tokens to access information about the user’s device such as location, timestamp, device name, profile name, device email, and the like. This feature is indispensable because that information can be available in our flow and we don’t necessarily need to ask the user for it.
A lot of the button trigger tokens that we’ll discuss are available in this link. This is why it’s important to become more familiar with the documentation.
On this web page, we’ll see all the types of button trigger tokens that are available in Power Automate.
They also have a full example on this page.
We’re going to do a different and much simpler example, but you can definitely follow this too.
Creating A Button Flow In Power Automate
Let’s now choose a button trigger token. For this example, we’ll use the user email. First, let’s create an instant flow.
Click New Step.
Then, search and click the Slack connector.
Choose the Post message action. We’ll post a Slack message that contains every button trigger token that we have access to.
We’ll post the message on the random channel.
Let’s click the Message text field. Even though we didn’t ask for any input within our flow, we’ll see that we now have access to User name, User email, Date, and many more. For this instance, let’s get their User email, Date, and Timestamp.
Then let’s rename our flow to Button Trigger Token Example.
Let’s save it and see how it works.
Testing The Flow
Click Test.
After that, choose I’ll perform the trigger action option and click Test.
Then click Continue.
Click Run flow.
Once the flow is done, let’s check the output in Slack. As we can see, it posted the person’s email, the date, and the timestamp of when the user actually ran the flow. We were able to get that information without having the user provide any of these details.
That’s how powerful this feature is. We can also create a flow that builds our email list, but make sure to ask for their permission first. Nevertheless, we can automatically collect their email if they’d like to subscribe to our newsletter or something similar.
***** Related Links *****
Workflow Sharing In Microsoft Power Automate
Power Automate Mobile App | Flows In Your Phone
Power Automate Documentation Walkthrough
Conclusion
All in all, button trigger tokens are very simple. They’re just pieces of information that you have access to every time your flow occurs without the user actually putting in anything. Most people use button flow in Power Automate when they want to create workflows related to submitting timesheets or expense reports.
There are lots of available default button trigger tokens. I’d recommend that you use a button flow when you’re going to share to multiple users instead of having them type in everything.
All the best,
Henry
