Using the new Power Automate sort expression in my Daily Gift Report

@Heather McLean Hi Heather- I would be glad to share but all I did was look at the API reference for List Gifts and the sort field had this info:

Represents a list of fields to sort the results by. Returns a list that sorts gifts based on the supplied fields. Results are in ascending order by default, and a '-' sign denotes descending order. For example, "sort=date_added,-date" sorts gifts by the "date_added" field in ascending order and then by the "gift date" field in descending order. If only the date_modified field or only the date_added field is provided, then this adds the sort_token parameter to the next_link URL to ensure that gifts are stably sorted.

@Amy Pierzchala
I think you've already found a better solution to your problem, but if you're still curious why you were getting an Internal Service Error when trying to sort your results, it's most likely because you are sorting an array of objects without telling Power Automate which property to sort by.

When you sort a normal array, all you need to do is tell sort() which array you want to sort, so your expression would look like this: sort(variables('Array'))

However, if you are sorting an array of objects, you also have to tell it which property you want to sort based on. In the case of List Gifts, you might want to sort by id or by date_added. You can do this with expressions like these:

sort(outputs('List_gifts')?['body/value'],'id')

sort(outputs('List_gifts')?['body/value'],'date_added')

There are some limitations here, which is why I think you're better off using the solution from Carolyn and Dan. The first limitation is that, if you have, say, 50,000 gifts in your database, sort() is only going to sort the 500 or so that are returned to Power Automate. So if you want to see the first 10 gifts ever made to your org, sort() isn't a good way to go about it.

Second, sort() can only sort by properties that are one level deep. This is an example of some output from List Gifts:

You can see that “id” is in the first level of the object (and therefore you can sort by it), but the Acknowledgement Status is an array of objects within the gift object. This means you can't easily sort by acknowledgement status using sort(). And gift value is also an object within an object, so no sorting by that, either!

Generally it's best to sort the data before bringing it into Power Automate when you can, and the option that Carolyn and Dan highlighted does just that. But hopefully this will help if you need to use sort() in the future.

@Craig Bruno
Assuming you are using Constituent List or Gift List actions, if you specified the “list” option to use a RE NXT list as your basis for getting records, then all other options are not going to be honored.

If you must use a gift list as basis, then use power automate sort expression to sort the values property from List gifts and use that in the apply to each loop:

sort(outputs('List_gifts')?['body/value'], 'date_added')

sort() expression will sort ascending order, if you want descending order, use reverse() on the sort()

reverse(sort(outputs('List_gifts')?['body/value'], 'date_added'))