Flow to Randomly Pair Items from Two Different Lists

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Posted on by ggoodfellow

I have the following two lists either in SharePoint or Excel:

List 1: FirstName, LastName, Email

List 2: SeatNumber (A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, etc.)

The first is a listing of students. The second is a listing of seat number in our classroom. I would like to create a flow that randomly pairs a Seat Number from List 2 to a Student in List 1 and produces a list of each student's seat assignment for the day.

What strategy would I use to accomplish this with Power Automate?

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Building flows

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GeoffRen Microsoft Employee on at

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You can use Office Scripts, specifically Office Scripts with Power Automate. This is the 'Run Script' action on the Excel connector. With Office Scripts you can use the 'Run Script' action to execute javascript against a workbook. So you can get the info from the Excel workbook then use the `Math.random()` function to help you pair the lists together randomly. Finally, you can write the assignments back to Excel, all in the same script.

I don't know what format your data is held in or where you want it written/sent to, so here's a basic script that can do this. In your flow, you'll need to pass in two parameters: a list of students (just a string array here), and the list of seat numbers (also an array of strings). It'll return an array of student to seat mappings, ex [{ student: 'Bob', seat: 'a5' }, { student: 'Josh', seat: 'b4' }]

function main(workbook: ExcelScript.Workbook, students: string[], seats: string[]): { student: string; assignment: string }[] { const assignments = []; for (let i = 0; i < students.length; i++) { const randomSeat = Math.floor(Math.random() * Math.floor(seats.length)); assignments.push({ student: students[i], assignment: seats[randomSeat] }); seats.splice(randomSeat, 1); } return assignments; }

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ggoodfellow on at

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Many thanks! I will see if I can get that to work. I'm new to Javascript but willing to learn.

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mahoneypat 1,720 on at

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Please see this post by Ed Gonzales in this previously solved post. It is very close to what you are describing.

Solved: Anyone good with Array, SharePoint Lists and Rando... - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com)

Regards,
Pat

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ggoodfellow on at

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Many thanks for the linked post. It is nice to see several options to complete something similar.

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Robert94 520 on at

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Hi,
I have the same project and I can`t get it to work, would it be possible for you if you`d attach some pics with the flow?

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