Populating Word template with the CDS image field content via Flow (Power Automate)

This is a great video which helped me on a way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1jsBllmr-w

However, in this video it takes image from OneDrive but I want to populate it from CDS image field.

1. Add image control to a Word template. Watch video I referred above showing how to add controls step by step then come back for the image adding part.

2. This is my image store in CDS:

3. And a CDS field set up.

4. And now Flow:

Here JobDescription and JobImage are fields of a Job entity.

5. A bit of actions outputs to see how image is stored:

The format is: application/octet-stream.

According to docs(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-nz/connectors/wordonlinebusiness/#populate-a-microsoft-word-template):

Guide for using Images in the Word Online connector.

1. Add an Image content controller in your template. Don’t delete the placeholder image. You can re-size and re-position it.
2. Add a title property to the image content controller so that you can easily identify it in the Power Automate designer.
3. When the image field shows up in the designer, add file contents of a JPG or PNG image as the value. The value should look like this: { “$content-type”: “image/png”, “$content”: “iVBORw0KG…i/DhQmCC” } where the content is the base64 encoded image.

6. That’s why we use Compose to construct the required JSON:

7. And the result in the generated document as expected:

Hope it helps!

Update: the version I described retrieves a thumbnail image. Microsoft released the CDS action since then Get file or image. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/commondataserviceforapps/#get-file-or-image-content?WT.mc_id=BA-MVP-5003463

This action retrieves the original image (if you choose to store one) from Azure BLOB. Then you need to apply base64(…) function and compose the JSON as per screenshot below:

Feeding the Output of the Compose to your Populate Word template action

If you are interested in more doc generation info watch my video here: