Build array of strings

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I am completely new to Flow, and I am trying to achieve something that feels rather complicated so far.

My scenario is that people create issues in a SharePoint list, each issue having a person assigned to it. At the begining of each day I need a flow that will iterate over the newly created items and will send a single email containing all the issues to each assignee.

I have managed to use the SharePoint action Get Items to filter the items I need, and now I have 2 problems:

1. I can't filter only the items which have an Assigne

2. I can't group the items based on the Assigne

 - here my idea is to loop through the items, and create and array of emails (which I am stuck on)

 - then loop through that array of emails and build the email with all the items for that person (which I'll figure out next)

The Assigne is a Person or Group column in SharePoint set to only allow single selection.

Now, my questions are:

1. How can we check for null on a Person column?

2. How can we build and array of strings?

I have tried to use the following condition to check for null, but it doesn't evaluate - it will return even the items which have no Assignee.

@not(equals(items('Apply_to_each')?['Assignee']?['Email'], 'null'))

Thanks,

Melinda

[v-micsh-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

 If you would like to check if value is Null using the workflow definition language, we need to take use of the empty function.

For example:

@not(empty(items('Apply_to_each')?['Assignee']?['Email']))

The Empty () function checks whether there is a value with the item specified.

Workflow definition language

For your second question, there is a filter Array action, which could be used to filter within the table returned by the Get items action.

Filter arrays

Besides, does the list contain multiple assignee, and with each assignee, there are multiple issues assigned to them?

If this is the case, then we may need to first generate the assignee list, then use the assignee to filter the Get items table.

There is a similar scenario, which you may take a reference:

Need to trigger signle email for same set of records in Excel using Microsoft Flow

And post back if you have any further questions.

Regards,

Michael

[Anonymous]

Hi @v-micsh-msft

Thanks for the reply 🙂 

The first question I have managed to solve yesterday by simply removing the quotes around null... and for the second one I was going down a more complicated route, building a string of emails separated by ',', then splitting that to form the array, then iterate over the array and call the SharePoint REST api to filter the items for each email address.

I have had a look over your solution and I will give it a try as it seems much more simpler.

I'll post back once I have some updates.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

@v-micsh-msft

Just to confirm and close this topic, I have followed the other post you have referenced, and it all worked as a charm 🙂

The array filtering also came in handy, so my flow is now completed and working as exected.

Thanks for the help 🙂