Using PA - creating random pairs of people from an excel table and emailing them

[Bendikov]

I have an excel file on OneDrive with a list of employees, and I want a flow that every monday creates pairs of people which are emailed with the simple suggestion that these two people get together for coffee.

The point is for people to get to know eachother, so pair creation should be random, but they need not be tracked - if some people meet for a second time that is fine.

If the number of people is odd, a random person can simply be dropped from the list each week.

I have no experience with PA, I have managed to retrieve the excel and generate emails, but the shuffling of rows and pair creation confuses me. I have asked chatGPT with no good solution provided from there.

Appreciate pointers in the right direction

[ManishSolanki · Accepted solution]

Hi @Bendikov 

You can refer the below sample flow:

1. Firstly, get all rows from excel and create an array of emails using 'Select' action. Assuming you have already achieved those steps:

I have used 'Email' column in the excel file, pls modify it as per your need.

2. Next, we will initialize 2 variables to store email values of employees:

3. Now, we will iterate until we get different emails in both variables:

Expression used in 'Set variable' to update the value is same for both variables:

body('Select')[rand(0,length(body('Select')))]

After this step, you will get different email addresses of employees in the variables which you can further use those in your flow.

If this helps & solves your problem, please remember to give a 👍 and accept my solution as it will help others in the future.

Thanks

[Bendikov]

Thanks for your response. This is a nice step indeed and is a good solution for the shuffleing of the array.

Can I ask how you would use this to further solve the overarching task here - I need to pair up everyone and email them. Following your solution, you find two emails and put them in a variable. I guess I can use that to send one email, and then I need to repeat the process until there are no more possible pairs. That means I need some more loops. In more classic coding context I would simply repeat what you do, remove emails from the main list, and then repeat until empty.

[Bendikov]

Adding a reply to myself - I put the solution inside a "Do until" loop, filtering the email array for each iteration. This worked.

[xTZ]

Would you be able to share the solution you put inside the "Do until" loop?