SharePains

SharePoint’s multi-people fields in Power Automate

SharePoint’s multi-people fields in Power Automate

By:

Pieter Veenstra

Date:

Quite a common requirements for Microsoft Flow is to use a multi-people field to create a single event in a calendar or a single email.

The poor way

You will probably start by creating a SharePoint list with a people field that can hold multiple people.

Then you create a flow that triggers on the creation of an item in this list. Then you add a create event action in the Flow and  you end up with a flow like this:

SharePoint's multi-people fields in Power Automate

That’s not nice. Flow has now added a Apply to each step. this then results into multiple events being created.

How do we solve this one?

I’m starting this by initialising 3 variables.

SharePoint's multi-people fields in Power Automate

Now I’m setting 3 variables :

  • Attendee – is a copy of my email field. Although not really needed it does help when you debug the flow to have this available within the run history output
  • Attendees – The list of attendees that the flow is building up. this will be used for the create event action
  • Previous Attendees – This is a variable to store the values in temporarily as the set variablee doesn’t like to use the same variable to set and to reference within its new  value.

Again an Apply to each will appear, but this time I’m happy with that as I can now concatenate the attendees into a single string. It would be nice to just use 2 variables but it isn’t possible to assign a value to a variable using the value of the variable itself.

SharePoint's multi-people fields in Power Automate

The concat function looks like this

concat(variables(‘Previous Attendees’),’;’,items(‘Apply_to_each’)?[‘Email’])
or
concat(variables(‘Previous Attendees’),’;’,variables(‘Attendee’))

Then finally I adjust the required attendees in my event by using by attendees variable and all works as I wanted:

SharePoint's multi-people fields in Power Automate

The better way

To create a semicolon separated list of email addresses from a people field you can also follow a better pattern.

First use a Seelct action and feed it with the People field in your SharePoint list.

Then use a compose action and set this to:

join(body('Select'),';')

You will now have a flow that looks like this:

SharePoint's multi-people fields in Power Automate

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There’s a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I’m the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I’ve been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://staging.sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://staging.sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@staging.sharepains.com

Categories:

,

Tags:

15 responses to “SharePoint’s multi-people fields in Power Automate”

  1. Priscilla Haber Mahoney Avatar
    Priscilla Haber Mahoney

    Hi Pieter, I’m curios – why did you create 3 variables ? I updated mine with 1 variable, and eventually solved my issue

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      Hi Priscilla,

      You probably could do things with one variable by using more complex expressions. I try a however to put the complexity in the actions rather than the expressions. How did you set your variable?

      1. Priscilla Haber Mahoney Avatar
        Priscilla Haber Mahoney

        Hi,

        I just created a string variable: “Attendees”
        – composed the function: concat(item()?[‘Email’],’;’,variables(‘Attendees’))
        – Set the variable to the compose output.

      2. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
        Pieter Veenstra

        Is that email field a multi people column in SharePoint?

  2. Priscilla Haber Mahoney Avatar
    Priscilla Haber Mahoney

    yes it is

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      Hi Priscilla,
      I now understand what you meant. I now added the details of the concat function to the post.

  3. Crockerfeller Avatar
    Crockerfeller

    I solved this by doing the following:

    1.) Initialize an array variable called “Notify List Array”
    2.) Initialize a string variable called “Notify List Emails”
    3.) Apply-to-each and use the “Append to array variable” action
    -Name: “Notify List Array”
    -Value: insert dynamic content for your multi people list
    4.) Use a Join Array action:
    – From: Notify List Array
    – Join with a semicolon ;
    5.) Set Variable Notify List Email = Output from the join array action

    Now you can use the variable in a send email action. 🙂

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      Hi Chrisopher,

      Thanks you for your comment. Filtering the data in the array is indeed a bit cleaner.

  4. Devang MISTRY Avatar
    Devang MISTRY

    This is for email field. How would it work if I have multiple people picker selections as display name, I am not able to make it work. I have a people picker column in a task list which allows tagging multiple users, it shows display name.

  5. Thermo Fisher Scientific Avatar
    Thermo Fisher Scientific

    I have the same question as Devang?

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      Hi Cindy and Devang (Sorry I missed your comment),

      I created a multi people field and called this People.

      People Array in Compose action

      I can now refer to this People array using output(‘Compose’)?[‘People’] The Email address of the people selected can be found in the Email property within the array.

  6. Wendy Avatar
    Wendy

    Hi there, and thank you very much for your post.

    I’m the administrator for a SharePoint document library, and whenever a new document is uploaded an email needs to be triggered to multiple recipients. The solution that works best is your original solution where 3 variables are set, however for some reason I am receiving every email in duplicate and I don’t know why. I am uploading the documents, so not sure if that has anything to do with it. The recipients are all just getting one email, addressed to all recipients – which is the goal I’m trying to achieve.

    I’m afraid I’m not an advanced Power Automate user, so I failed to apply the alternative solutions suggested by Priscilla and Crockerfeller.

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      Hi Wendy,

      Can you share your flow through the chat o this site?

  7. blureu Avatar
    blureu

    Thanks for the tip!

  8. Ian Harrison Avatar
    Ian Harrison

    I tried following ‘the better way’ here. However, I’m not clear on the map used in the select. If i try and put the dynamic reference to the email in the field in here (as it looks like in the screen grab) it automatically creates a for loop as it is looking at the array of email addresses. What should the map be?

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Recent Posts

All Categories