Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

I have a SharePoint list with several columns. I need to prevent users from entering duplicate combinations of Staff ID and Date. I created a calculated column to merge these two fields, but I discovered that calculated columns can't enforce unique values. I've been advised to use a Power Automate flow. Could someone please provide the steps and flow actions needed to achieve this?

Categories:

Building flows

For the person who advised you to use Power Automate, what did they suggest you do through Power Automate? A round idea would be:

Create a text column in your list to hold the combined value.
Add a flow with a trigger when a new item is created.
Use a compose action to generate the value to populate in the SharePoint list.
Use a Get items action from the SharePoint list with a filter query using the Output of the above compose action in a filter query to see if there are any items in list with the value.
Add a condition with a length expression to find how many items are returned from the get items action. The condition will be where the length of what is returned is equal to 0 (zero).
On the yes side of the condition, if not items found, update the item from the trigger with the value.
On the no side, send an e-mail or do whatever you want to tell the person an item already exists with that value and then delete the item.