'Randomly' assign project to members of a team group chat

[clecca]

I have generated the following Power Automate flow, the flow will be executed monthly on the 1st of each month, it gets the SharePoint project list and gets the users from a Microsoft teams chat group.
For this example, there are 4 projects and 5 user accounts members of MS teams chat group.
With this data I assign each user to one of the 4 projects, until I complete the assignment of the 4 projects to each user, in this case 1 user would be free of assignment 😀.

User: outputs('List_members')?['body/value'][rand(0,3)]['displayName']

However, the assignment of users to projects are repeated, this is the problem I have, I would like some idea or solution to solve this.

Example of result, message sent to MS Teams chat in HTML table format. Here the user "User1" is repeated 3 times.

[grantjenkins]

What would you want to happen if you had 5+ projects and only 4 users?

[grantjenkins · Accepted solution]

Hopefully this will get what you're looking for. The flow should work for any number of projects and users.

For this example I have the following SharePoint list with 4 projects.

And my Teams Group Chat has three users.

See full flow below. I'll go into each of the actions.

Recurrence is what you already have.

Get items retrieves our projects.

List members gets our members.

Select Random Members selects the Display Name for each Member and adds an automatically generated GUID which we will use to randomly sort each member. The expression used to generate the GUID is.

guid()

Compose sorts each of the members by their GUID using the following expression.

sort(body('Select_Random_Members'), 'ID')

Select uses the following expression for the input and the Project/User values. 

//From
//will return an array of numbers from 0 up to the length of projects
//[0, 1, 2, 3, ...]
range(0, length(outputs('Get_items')?['body/value']))

//Project
//will get the Title of the project using the current index
outputs('Get_items')?['body/value']?[item()]?['Title']

//User
//will get the name of the user using the current index, and the mod (remainder) of the length of items so it will cycle through the members for each project.
outputs('Compose')?[mod(item(), length(outputs('Compose')))]?['Name']

Each time we run the flow, the users will be randomly sorted and assigned the projects. Below are a the outputs from a couple of flow runs.

Run 1

[
  {
    "Project": "Project 0001",
    "User": "Joe Bloggs"
  },
  {
    "Project": "Project 0002",
    "User": "Grant Jenkins"
  },
  {
    "Project": "Project 0003",
    "User": "Jane Doe"
  },
  {
    "Project": "Project 0004",
    "User": "Joe Bloggs"
  }
]

Run 2

[
  {
    "Project": "Project 0001",
    "User": "Grant Jenkins"
  },
  {
    "Project": "Project 0002",
    "User": "Joe Bloggs"
  },
  {
    "Project": "Project 0003",
    "User": "Jane Doe"
  },
  {
    "Project": "Project 0004",
    "User": "Grant Jenkins"
  }
]

You can then use the output from the Select for your post.

[clecca]

mmmm, Good data, it would be that in that case if it is repeated but only once a user, because currently it is repeated more than once a user.

[clecca]

Hello,

I have performed the test, however, somehow it is generating me the result in an order, and it seems to me that it is because of the sort() expression in the Compose. ☹️

First result

Second result

third result

[grantjenkins]

If you have less projects than users then a user will only get one project, and some users won't get a project.

If you have more projects than users then each user would get at least one project, but some would end up with more than one to cater for the number of projects.

The order will always show the Projects in the same order, but the user assignments will be random each time - that's what you're after right?

[clecca]

I understand, but if you look at the images you will see that the first two users do not exchange with the projects below, likewise with the last two users.

Currently, there are 4 projects and 4 users.

Indeed, the projects column has its static order and should not change, only the assignments on the users column.