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How to swap "Last name, First name middle initial" to "First name middle initial Last name" for a column with multiple people entries?

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Posted on by SM-15101351-0

Greetings,

I have a people column with multiple entries, no entries, or single entries per "cell". The DisplayName format for system generated lookups is Last Name, First Name Middle initial (and more if it's needed for other names for a single person) I need to swap each of those people names around such that it's First Name Middle Initial (and whatever other names in the middle) then Last Name.

I found this: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Flows/Change-display-name-to-first-then-last-name/td-p/876327

But I believe that's assuming a single name in said "cell" of a SharePoint list that it's coming from.

This is my current flow that accumulates the name values as last name first, first name m.i.

As it's near the end of my week I'm going to put the flow back to operational state and try again Monday.

If I can get a solution to this particular part that works I can implement it from there with the rest of the flow I've built. As well as implement it for 4 people columns as well.

Hmmm... I wonder if I could just add the blocks from the link shared above below my flow snippet? That could be my solution. Where I'm joining the Main Customer names I'm using a semicolon as the people separator. So the split and flip from that solution might work using the comma space as a separator for the last name, first name m.i..... I'll give that a go Monday. If you agree this should work, or think you have a better solution, I'm certainly glad to hear it!

Thanks in advance,

McGeeks

It's like McDonald's, but for a computer nerd! Ha!

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abm abm 32,985 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @mcgeeks

So you have a comma between like

Smith, David H

So you want David H Smith.

Please give me an example of the name you having.

Thanks

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abm abm 32,985 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @mcgeeks

Please see below steps:

Here I am checking IF middle name present or not.

Expression in the order are:

Compose 2

split(outputs('Compose'), ' ')

If condition left side expression

outputs('Compose_2')?[2]

Compose 3

outputs('Compose_2')?[1] outputs('Compose_2')?[2] first(split(outputs('Compose_2')?[0], ','))

Compose 4

outputs('Compose_2')?[1] first(split(outputs('Compose_2')?[0], ','))

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grantjenkins 11,063 Moderator on at

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Hopefully this is what you're after. Assuming your Display Name is always in the format Last Name, First Name Initials.

For this example, I have the following list item that has a multi-select Person column.

See full flow below. I'll go into each of the actions.

I'm not sure what your trigger is, so I've just got a Manual flow and used Get item to retrieve the list item.

Select uses the Owners from Get item and the following expression to swap the names around.

concat( trim(last(split(item()?['DisplayName'], ','))), ' ', first(split(item()?['DisplayName'], ',')) )

Join users the output from the Select and joins by semi-colon.

After running the flow, we would have the following output.

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SM-15101351-0 27 on at

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I still have some work to do, but this is probably my fix, thanks for that. I am running into errors when initially trying it though. If say the cell is blank of names, I get an error. If the cell contains one name, error. It's looking for an array and getting a string. I'll work that out. I'll create logic to catch each scenario and handle it appropriately. Thanks.

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grantjenkins 11,063 Moderator on at

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I just tried it with multiple users selected, a single person selected, and no persons selected (blank) and all work as expected. If it's a multiselect Person column then it will always come back as an array even if single user or no user.

It should work for each of the rows below.

Are you able to show the error you are getting?

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