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Posted on by CmdrKeene

I'm having a hard time with the "filter array" step after retriving SharePoint items. Without the filter, all items are returned. But when I try to filter, it returns nothing. The output of the filter step is just an empty array []

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. My goal is to have a filter like this.

Items with a "Status" field equal to "Pending", and then any items where the user that initated the flow is in any of the fields "Assigned To", "RVP", or "TSM". My filter step looks like this:

@and(
 equals(item()?['Status'], 'Pending'),
 or(
 equals(item()?['Assigned_x0020_To'], triggerOutputs()['headers']['x-ms-user-name-encoded']),
 equals(item()?['RVP'],triggerOutputs()['headers']['x-ms-user-name-encoded']),
 equals(item()?['TSM'], triggerOutputs()['headers']['x-ms-user-name-encoded'])
 )
)

When this didn't work, I tried simply

@equals(item()?['Status'], 'Pending')

but that didn't work either. It always returns no items.

I've also tried defining it using the UI instead of advanced:

The field is named "Saved Status" but the true internal name of the field is just "Status". I also notice that the Flow UI lists both "Save Status" and "Save Status Value" as possible field choices for the left side of the filter step, but neither works. I definitely verified that there are items in the list with the Pending status.

My end goal is to have a button flow that lets a user receive an email with the list items relevant to them in the email body.

Categories:

Building flows

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ScottShearer 25,329 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@CmdrKeene

I obviously don't know your situation, but is there a reason that you didn't use an OData filter in your Get Items action? That will likely eliminate the need to do any other filtering as well as making your Flow faster.

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CmdrKeene 17 on at

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Excellent question and point, I totally agree. Although I think that becomes a new question of how to achieve my filter in OData, I wasn't finding success in trying to craft my particular and/or filters in there. But using "Status eq 'Pending" in the OData filter worked, so that's a good sign. I'm going to dig deeper into the documenation on that front now.

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CmdrKeene 17 on at

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My initial test met failure, trying to filter to Status=Pending and AssignedTo=(user who started flow). I'm assuming I need to use SharePoint's intial field name here "Assigned_x0020_To" here. But this resulted in an error 400, The expression \"Status eq 'Pending' AND Assigned_x0020_To eq Shawn Keene\" is not valid.

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ScottShearer 25,329 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@CmdrKeene

Glad to hear it.

On thing to note when using OData filters with SharePoint - Flow usually uses the internal column names in the OData filters. So, it you have columns with spaces and in some other circumstances, then you'll need to find out how Flow references the column.

An easy way to see how Flow refers to a column is to use a Get Items action with no filter, run the Flow and then look at the output. Refer to the columns in the same way as they appear in the output.

Finally, here a a blog post on using OData filters with SharePoint in Flow.

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ScottShearer 25,329 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@CmdrKeene

If assigned to is a person or group column, then there are some special rules which are explained here.

If you use the email address instead, I suspect that AssignedTo/Email is likely the correct syntax.

Also, you can't assume that Assigned to will be referred to with the _x0020_ - use my earlier suggestion and look at the ouput of Get Items on a successful run.

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CmdrKeene 17 on at

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I was really getting hopeful but I'm losing that hope. I've tried just about everything I've found or can think of.
Since I couldn't get the OData filter to work, at this point I resigned to using OData filter for the base query (just get pending items, which returns ~ 50 records), then I figured I'd use a secondary filter step to limit those to only ones where the user launching the flow appeared in any of the 3 fields they could be in. But try as I might, that filter option always ends up giving me an empty array.

I wasn't able to find the referenced link on the Doctor Flow blog that was mentioned in that other thread.

I was able to determine a few things:
Retreiving all items and looking at the output, I did see the field referenced as Assigned_x0020_To, which itself is an array of other properties like DisplayName and Email.
Setting a filter action to be something like AssignedTo Email contains "Smith" correctly identifies records that are assigned to a user with an email of "TSmith@...", but I observed it is case-sensitive. If I use the variable of triggerOutputs()['headers']['x--ms-user-email-encoded'] (aka "email of user that triggered flow"), that value itself is lowercase and doesn't match so causes the filter to return an empty array. That might be possible to fix if I could find the correct syntax to convert the sharepoint assignedTo email to a lowercase string.

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