Exposing "Other" responses in Power Automate

[DerekKonofalski]

We've got a Survey123 form with a Dropdown question where we've selected the option to allow for "Other" responses. My understanding is that anything submitted under "Other" gets saved to the feature layer in a new column/attribute called question_name_other or something similar.

We're taking the submission information and processing it with Power Automate and, for some reason, it doesn't show the "Other" response field. I can select the Dropdown question but that results in any "Other" responses returning "other" as the response rather than whatever the user typed into the "Other" box.

How do we expose the actual response from the "Other" box?

[DerekKonofalski · Accepted solution]

Looks like I answered my own question through some testing:

You can use the "Other" response by manually typing in an expression using

triggerOutputs()?['body/feature/attributes/reason_for_denial_other']​

[lmelendez_ADMIN]

hey @DerekKonofalski, just confirming that what you are saying is by creating a column (assuming your PowerAutomate-ing to an excel sheet) with the other_question heading and then by placing your above trigger syntax into Powerautomate that corresponds to that question you can get the actual data that was manually typed into the "other" field?

[DerekKonofalski]

Hi, @lmelendez_ADMIN!

Not exactly. We’re not using a spreadsheet but I don’t see why this wouldn’t work with a spreadsheet. I’m taking the results and using a switching flow to send various emails based on the responses to the Survey123 form. In this case, one of the emails specifies a “reason for cancellation”. So, in the body of the email, I’ve set that line to either echo out one of the responses or, if “Other” was selected, to echo the response typed into the “Other” box. Getting the standard responses was easy because they show up in the list of dynamic content from previous steps. The “Other” responses were not available but I was able to get them to echo by inserting an expression and setting the expression manually to the string I listed in my previous reply.

[lmelendez_ADMIN]

got it @DerekKonofalski , this solves a major issue for us, glad I stumbled upon this post!

[DerekKonofalski]

Let me know if you get stuck! I may be able to help!

[JohnNergeBrooklynPark]

If you're like me and struggled to figure out the exact syntax to do this, here's what I had to use.

@{triggerOutputs()?['body/feature/attributes/YourFieldName']}

And the trick is to paste that (as plain text if needed) directly into the step parameter, i.e., don't pull up the dynamic content window and try insert it as an expression because you'll get an error.

I included a screenshot to hopefully help show what I mean.