Joanne Morris,

as far as I know , you have to make use of set variable action in the workflow to get data from the field. Not sure if there any other efficient way of doing this but the below worked for me.

step 1. Get //Items/Item[Index]/Department to variable wvDepartment.

Step 2. add Convert action and supply wvDepartment to wvDepartmentID to make it proper number field.

Step 3. add set variable like below to get actual data from source list and make use of it where I needed it.

I hope this helps!

Thanks Jaya Borra. I'm not quite following this. 

This is my repeating section, with WaterCart as the lookup field and the repeating section name = rsWaterCarts 

If I query XML, I get back a number (ID?) - RSWaterCart

Then you suggest to Convert Value: where RSWaterCartID is a number. Not sure if this is what you meant?

Then set a variable? The repeating section data is still in xml at this point. How do I pull the text part of the lookup value out of xml using the ID number?

Joanne Morris , 

there is no text part of lookup field in the XML to pull, all you got is ID value. I happen to assign the //Items/ItemeIndex]/WaterCart to a text variable to be able to handle blank values, and then assign that value if not blank to a number field variable. using that number data type variable to get actual text data of look up list.

I hope I was able to simply my description a bit. my test site is down to show the example action blocks to match my above explanation. 

Can you post the actual XML data in full? It would be useful in helping to solve this problem. 

You can send it to yourself using a plain text Notification action, or if the Repeating Section is already associated to a Column on your SharePoint list, you can simply copy / paste that here to this forum.