Problem setting default selected items in people column via a collection

[powerUser1611]

Good afternoon,

I am building an app that allows users to select who they want to review a document. To record this, users can select people via a people picker. Often, these documents are reviewed by the same group of 20+ people. To save users the effort of manually typing in and selecting 20+ users into the people field, I want to create a button to load in a list of the 20 people they usually review.

In summary, by clicking the "Add DDWG Regular Members" button, I want to populate the multiselect people picker with a list of names, defined here:

I am creating a collection of a SharePoint list which contains the members I want to add. The data source DDWGMembers is a SharePoint list which has two columns: 'Member' (people column) and 'MembershipType' (choice column).

The above image is the formula on the DefaultSelectedItems property of the Combobox. The Default property of the Datacard is the same.

The filter is working correctly and returning the 20 people I want to populate the combobox. The problem is that the combobox does not show anything in it, even though the formula is clearly returning 20 records.

What am I missing here? I have noticed that the Default property of the combobox is empty. Does that have something to do with it?

Thanks a ton for any help. I feel like I'm 99% there but can't figure out this last push.

[RandyHayes]

@powerUser1611 

For a Combobox, the Default property is meaningless.  It is the DefaultSelectedItems (DSI) property that selects what you want.

The records of the table supplied to the DSI *must* match the Items property records.

What is the Items property of the combobox?

[powerUser1611]

@RandyHayes 

Thanks for your response, Randy.

My Items property is: 

My DSI is: 

If(varDDWGMembers=false, ThisItem.RequiredReviews, Filter(colDDWGMembers, MembershipType.Value="Member")).

When I copy the DSI Items property into my Items property, it throws errors all over my screen.

What do you advise?

EDIT:

The errors are with my OnChange Patch functions

[powerUser1611 · Accepted solution]

I figured it out, so I will reply to my own post to help people in the future.

In summary, I was trying to set the Default Selected Items (DSI) property of a SharePoint People column combobox with an entire list of people. This list is also hosted in SharePoint, containing a single people column named 'Members'. To set the DSI of a combobox connected to a SharePoint people column, it must be written as a JSON object, as follows: 

{ 
  DisplayName:[Display Name],
  Claims:"i:0#.f|membership|" & [Email], 
  Department:"",  
  Email: [Email], 
  JobTitle:"", 
  Picture:""
}

The values in [brackets] should be replaced with real values. To keep this formatting but also write several people into the DSI, I used the ForAll function. The ForAll function runs a formula for every record it finds in a data source. That means if I have 19 people in my SharePoint Members list, ForAll will run a formula 19 times, once against each entry. See syntax below.

In this instance, since I have 19 items in my SharePoint list, ForAll is going to run once for each entry, resulting in 19 unique JSON objects (the block of text in curly brackets { }) each. This allows the column to correctly identify the DSI as an object, and shows the entries.