Why does this condition always go to false?

[MrtnM]

Building a Flow to add an subscriber to a Mailchimp list. Since the options in the Mailchimp connector are quite basic, I must use a condition to check if an email address is already in the list (because if it is already on the list when I try to add the address, the Flow will show an error).

But my condition always goes to false, and I can't understand why.

The images show a test Flow using the functionality I want to use. 

Condition goes to false.

The Outputs of "Compose Body of Show list members" contains over 3 000 000 characters, but there really is a "gmail" in there somewhere. 

[srApps]

Think it is resulting in false because it is comparing an array of objects to a string. Does it work if on the left side of the condition you use the join expression:

join(outputs('Compose_Body_of_Show_list_members'), ',')

[MrtnM]

Thanks! You mean like this?

Unfortunately, this results in:

"Unable to process template language expressions for action 'Condition' at line '0' and column '0': 'The template language function 'join' expects its first parameter to be an array. The provided value is of type 'Object'. Please see https://aka.ms/logicexpressions#join for usage details.'."

So, I guess that means it wasn't an array, but an object, andd that I either will have to make left side of condition into an array before joining, or turn the right side into an object ...?

[srApps · Accepted solution]

When you look at the output of that Compose, what does the very beginning of it look like? Does it start like this:

{

  "users": [

    {

If so, you can change the expression to get "inside" the object.

join(outputs('Compose_Body_of_Show_list_members')?['users'], ',')

[grantjenkins]

3 million characters - that's a lot of data.

You could always convert your object(s) to a large string by wrapping it into a string expression. So, you would end up checking to see if your 3-million-character string contained the email.

string(outputs('Compose_Body_of_Show_list_members'))

Alternatively, as @srApps mentioned, if you had an array within your object that contained user data then you could extract out just the email addresses into an array, then the Condition would work as expected (condition: does the array of email addresses contain the email address).

[srApps]

I like how there are multiple ways to do it. I just don't think of the simplest way to do it sometimes 😁

[grantjenkins]

That's why I love these forums - I see so many variations of solutions that help me learn every day.

In hindsight, I think my suggestion converting everything to a large string is not the best solution. There will still be cases where it will fail. Example: if there was an email called wildbill@gmail, and the check was to see if there was an email called bill@gmail it would return true but doesn't actually contain that exact email.

Definitely better to see if array of user data, extract the emails to array, and check if the array contains the exact email.

[srApps]

The string should still have the " " characters around the email (it looks like it outputs JSON) so the right side of the condition could have "person@email.com" as what to look for. So I think that should still work as a string.

[MrtnM]

That did the trick 👍

Outputs starts with 

{"members":[{

so the expression 

join(outputs('Compose_Body_of_Show_list_members')?['members'], ',')

works like a charm.

Thanks!

[MrtnM]

Solution found by @srApps , kudos to @grantjenkins for ideas and inspiration 😁 

[MrtnM]

Well ... so I used this in a real life scenario, and of course it didn't work. I post this just for future reference.

The "Show list members" Mailchimp action only gets the first (=oldest) 1000 objects in the list, even if you ask it to get a higher number. Reference: MailChimp - Connectors | Microsoft Learn This is plaiun stupid, since there may be a lot more members on a Mailchimp list.

[grantjenkins]

In your Show list members action can you go into Settings and see if it has an option for Pagination. If so, turn it on and add the total number of items you want to return, and it would return the items in batches until it gets all the items, or the number of items you set. If it doesn't have this option, then it might just be a hard limit.

See example for the SharePoint Get items action.

[MrtnM]

Thanks, but no, sadly not possible 😕

From https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/mailchimp/#show-list-members:

And Settings:

[srApps]

Offset appears to be their way of pagination. Depending on how many "list members" you have you could add additional actions, the 2nd one having an offset of 1000 and maximum results of 1000. If you have a ton of list members it may be better to use a loop with a variable for the offset that increments by 1000 each loop until body?['members'] is empty. It would also be better if that connector allowed you to select which fields to include (like their API allows) so you only get the email address instead of all the other properties of each member.

[MrtnM]

O, why didn't I think of that (embarrassed). It works 🙂

And yes, it certainly would be nice to get just the email addresses. Right now, my Flow needs to look through 7 488 471 characters.