Referencing part of an array by element name

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Posted on by DragonLord

200

Hi,

I have an array :

[

{

"ExcelColumnName": "First Name",

"MatchingEmployeeColumnName": "Forenames"

{

"ExcelColumnName": "Surname",

"MatchingEmployeeColumnName": "Surname"

{

"ExcelColumnName": "National Insurance Number",

"MatchingEmployeeColumnName": "NINumber"

}

]

i want to be able to reference one of the rows in the array by using the "MatchingEmployeeColumnName" column, to get the "ExcelColumnName" column

example : i want to get the "ExcelColumnName" for the element that contains "NINumber" ..

is this possible in Power Automate?

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tom_riha 10,185 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hello @DragonLord ,

you can't reference it directly, but you can use the 'Filter array' action to filter only the entry where MatchingEmp... equals a specific NINumber. The output of the 'Filter array' will be a single object where you can extract the NINNumber using an expression, that might look like this:

first(body('Filter_array'))?['ExcelColumnName']

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DragonLord 200 on at

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i did try filter. it works. i was hoping for something more dynamic as i would need to identify 88 fields. thats a lot of filters .. lol

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tom_riha 10,185 Most Valuable Professional on at

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If you could change the input data format to have all the information as a single object, it would be much easier, you'd just access the specific values:

{ "First Name": "Forenames" "Surname": "Surname" "National Insurance Number": "NINumber" }
<the object>?['First name'] <the object>?['Surname'] <the object>?['National Insurance Number']

But if it must be an array where each property will be a separate object then I have to agree, it'll be a lot of filters.

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DragonLord 200 on at

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tried that , no success :

The template language expression 'variables('excelTUPEFieldList')?['Surname']' cannot be evaluated because property 'Surname' cannot be selected. Property selection is not supported on values of type 'String'.

{
"First Name": "john",
"Surname": "doe",
"National Insurance Number": "1234"
}

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tom_riha 10,185 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Did you define that the variable is of type Object? Wasn't it initialised as a string?

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DragonLord 200 on at

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i changed from a variable to a Compose , and i could reference it.
Just need to create the string object now from the table that returns the rows.

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tom_riha 10,185 Most Valuable Professional on at

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DragonLord 200 on at

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yes, this worked well for me.
learned something new today.

"děkuji a na zdraví" 🙂

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