Documentation › How to create text documents from template using Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) and Azure Logic Apps

Create text document from template in Power Automate

Note

There is a simpler way to create text documents from a template and use the result in Power Automate if needed.

This article demonstrates how to generate text document from a template with the help of Power Automate (Microsoft Flow).

This approach is suitable for text files generation as well as for plain text generation. In this article, we will generate a simple text file with the list based on some data. This is how our final file looks:

Result text file

Our resulting document has to be stored somewhere. Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) has a lot of connectors for different systems. Here are just a few of them:

  • SharePoint

  • Salesforce

  • Box

  • OneDrive

  • Google Drive

  • Dropbox

  • SFTP

  • File System

You can store your file anywhere. In this example, we will store our document in SharePoint. Our flow will use JSON object as a source data for the template, but you can get data from other sources. For example, query list items from SharePoint or from Salesforce.

The same is about source text template. You can store it somewhere as an HTML file and reuse it. In this example, we will put raw HTML code into the Flow action.

This is how our flow looks:

Result text file

Here is step by step description for the flow.

Flow trigger

You can actually pick any trigger. For example, you can start Flow on file creation in a SharePoint document library. We use “Manually trigger a flow” trigger here to simplify the Flow.

Create HTML from template

This is an action from Plumsail Documents connector. This action is suitable for generation of HTML and text documents.

You can find more information about this action here.

There are two parameters:

  1. Source HTML

  2. JSON

In the first parameter ‘Source HTML’ you can put raw HTML/text of a template or file content of a template from some other action. We specified raw text template in this example:

Departments:
{{#each departments}} - {{name}}
{{/each}}

This action supports rich templates with conditions, iterators and nested placeholders. Please read syntax description for more information.

In the second parameter, we specified data to apply to the template in JSON format. This is a list of department names:

{
  "departments": [
    {
      "name": "Accounting"
    },
    {
      "name": "IT"
    },
    {
      "name": "Sales"
    }
  ]
}

Create file

Now you need to store text file somewhere. In our example, we use “Create file” action from SharePoint connector to store the text document into SharePoint document library.

Select fields

You can use any other connector to store text document into your system.