Flow with switch gives an error message that I must have a valid array and not string

[Suzette]

Hi all

I an new to Power automate and experience an issue in a flow somebody else has constructed who is not with the company anylonger. Hope you can help until I have gained more knowledge about this...:-)

I have a flow that gives me this error message

Some background

The flow need to look into a list where there is a column called "Company to setup" which is drop-down functionality with a lot of company names. We want that when a user create an item and select a company from the drop-down then a mail notification is sent to a employee that is responsible for that company.

The flow that now give the error message looks like this:

Hope you can help me getting a fix

Thank you in advance.

[grantjenkins]

Is the "Company to setup" column in the SharePoint List a Choice column type or Lookup column type?

If it's of type Lookup, then there is a MUCH better way of constructing this flow (No Switch statements required) but need to know before coming up with a solution for you.

[grantjenkins]

I decided to create a solution assuming the Company column is a Lookup column.

In my example I've got a SharePoint List called Companies that just has the name of the company (Title field). This is the field you would use in your other list when getting the list of companies to choose from. The List also has another column called Contact of type Person that is set to Required and NOT allow multiple selections.

In my other List I've called it Sales where I just put the title of a sale and select what company it refers to. The Company column is a Lookup pointing to the Companies List and uses the Title field (Company Name).

The benefit of setting your lists up like this is that if you add a new company, you can just add the contact directly on the same item. And if a contact changes you can just update the Companies list with the new contact. This means you never have to redesign your Power Automate to reflect the changes.

Now onto the Power Automate. We just have the main trigger and two actions to get what you want.

The trigger is When an item is created based on the Sales list.

Next, we dynamically retrieve the contact for the customer that you selected in the Sales item. We can use Get item using the Customer Id property available to us from the trigger. This will always get the current company and associated contact in the Companies list.

Lastly, we can send out the email to the contact we just retrieved with relevant data.

You can see that we don't need any Switch statements or hardcode contacts directly into the Power Automate as it's now managed directly from the Companies List in SharePoint.

[Suzette]

FANTASTIC - THANK YOU SO MUCH. I will try it out immediately 🙂 

[Suzette]

Hi, I have now tried and so sorry for having to come back. I do not have any programming knowledge ;-).

So what did I do. I have this common list of company names with contact person per company:

I now did the flow thing but gets an error message:

I am not sure what parameter to select under Get item?

and how to make the flow sent mail to contact person

Hope you are willing to help again.

Thank you in advance.

Suzette  

[Suzette]

Hi, I just re did the full flow starting from a new one and now it works. great. i am very happy with this.

Thanks

Best regards