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Get Columns that Changed in a Sharepoint list

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Posted on by lordneeko

I have a flow that I want to use to report when changes are made to a SharePoint list (and to show exactly what changed). I'm posting the information as a notification in MS Teams.

I currently have the flow setup to grab the last change and that works just fine. The problem I'm running into is that the data is returned as an object like this:

{
"SinceVersionExisted": true,
"SinceVersionId": 1024,
"SinceVersionLabel": "2.0",
"UntilVersionIsCurrent": true,
"UntilVersionId": 1536,
"UntilVersionLabel": "3.0",
"ColumnHasChanged": {
"ID": false,
"Title": true,
"Priority_x0020_Tier": false,
"Section": true,
"DAA": false,
}
}

I want to be able to filter that "ColumnHasChanged" object for only those items that are "True" then output that as either a string or Table or something like this

Field	Changed
Title	true
Section	true

Eventually the plan is to retrieve the changes and show those as well (and eventually propagate those changes down-range, but I'm in the crawl phase right now.

I thought I'd be able to "apply to each" the "ColumnHasChanged" object, but that doesn't work because it isn't an array/collection.

Now sure how to proceed. Do I need to convert the object to an array?

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Building flows

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abm abm 32,865 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @lordneeko

With the current JSON structure you can't convert to XML and use XPath query to find where attribute values are true. The only option you have to use parse JSON step to parse and check individual property is true or not.

Pass the JSON to Parse JSON Step.

Next Use the below expression to check every single propery is true or not.

body('Parse_JSON')?['ColumnHasChanged']?['Title']

Check the value is true then add the Property name in an array.

Thanks

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lordneeko 55 on at

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So that is my problem. I don't want to have to parse each property name (Also, the data is already in JSON format, so I don't need to ParseJSON. The original data format is already set like that

What I want to do is simply grab all of it and print it out in a nicer format than
string(body('Get_changes_for_an_item_or_a_file_(properties_only)')?['ColumnHasChanged']) which is an ugly mess.

Also, I may not know what the property value's name is, since the owners of the list may have added a new field which is the "new or changed" item that I'm trying to report on.

Somehow, I need to convert
"ColumnHasChanged": {
"ID": false,
"Title": true,
etc
}
to an array like
[
{
"Field": "ID",
"Value": "false"
},
{
"Field": "Title",
"Value": "true"
},
{etc}
]

But without having to know what the values of "field" are ahead of time.

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abm abm 32,865 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @lordneeko

Like I mentioned earlier your current JSON format doesn't allow to convert to XML. Hence you can't use the xpath query which would have been ideal in this situation.

Please see this thread which I answered few hours ago.

Solved: Re: Trouble with Parse JSON schema - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com)

Thanks

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lordneeko 55 on at

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I'm providing my "solution"
This isn't pretty, and I hope someone can respond with a better way, but this is what I did

Details:
For Split the Object Data into an Array and Cleanup Extra Characters
split(replace(replace(replace(string(body('Get_changes_for_an_item_or_a_file_(properties_only)')?['ColumnHasChanged']), '{', ''),'}',''), '"', ''),',')

This gives me an array I can iterate on.

Then I use the condition compare split(item(), ':')[1] = "true"

then I append the following to my output String (variable initialized before the loops)
concat(split(item(), ':')[0], ',', split(item(), ':')[1])

this ends up with a string

Title, true
Modified, true
etc, true

I may do a little more so I can shove this into an HTML table for printing to my MS Teams message, but for now, this is where I'm at.

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lordneeko 55 on at

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Ok I'm updating this again as I've gotten smarter. I was actually able to meet my original goal of turning the Object, into an array which I can iterate over and work with (and use to push the data to other sources). The original 'solution' I submitted was VERY slow and this new version is at least 10 times faster (dependent on the number of changed items). Now, that I can parse the data into an array BEFORE iterating and creating the final string, I can filter out the data for only the 'true' items and only have to create my final output (string, HTML, etc) from the filtered list. MUCH faster.

Details:
The For Split the Object Data into an Array and Cleanup Extra Characters action is unchanged. However, after this point I instead use the SELECT function to create an array.
Then, I use PARSE JSON to turn it back into a set of objects I can work with, filter, etc

This gives me the solution I was hoping for with an array of objects that look like this
[
{
"Field": "ID",
"Value": "false"
},
{
"Field": "Title",
"Value": "true"
},
{etc}
]

Now, I can easily work with the data, send it on to other datasets, and post it (formatted) within a notification.

1 people found this reply helpful.

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