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Building a flow to export a SharePoint List to CSV and send emails - Issue - JSON present the CSV due to multiple choice items.

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Posted on by ericshufro

Hello.

I am brand new to Power Automate and am having trouble generating CSV file content from SharePoint lists where fields contain multiple choices; or the names of people selected from Active Directory. The resulting file contains JSON in each column instead of the multiple choice text items separated by commas. How do I solve this issue?

See below drawing.

Thank you in advance,

-Eric

The general idea is to build:

SharePoint List Export and Email Concept.png

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Building flows

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v-duann-msft on at

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Re: Building a flow to export a SharePoint List to CSV and send emails - Issue - JSON present the CSV due to multiple choice items.

Hi @ericshufro

Thank you for posting.

According to your description, you would like to export SharePoint list to csv file. But currently failed due to multi-select column existing. If any misunderstanding, please kindly let me know.

If that’s the case, we need to use variable to append each selection into a string to achieve your purpose.

I created a list only contains few columns for your reference. I enabled multi-select feature for people and system choice column as below.

Flow overview:

Flow in detail:

In 'apply to each 2'

Add ‘update item’ action to save people display names as string into a text column.

Use ‘get items 2’ to retrieve updated list.

Expression(Only works for multi-choice column): xpath(xml(json(concat('{"root":{"choices":', item()?['SupportSystem'] , '}}'))), '/root/choices/Value/text()')

After running the flow, I’m able to generate CSV as below:

Updated list:

New CSV file:

Hope the content above may help you.

Best regards,

Anna

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ericshufro 51 on at

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Re: Building a flow to export a SharePoint List to CSV and send emails - Issue - JSON present the CSV due to multiple choice items.

This is very helpful. Some of the data returned by getitems includes multi-line text fields. These fields contain HTML along with the provided text in the list. How can i strip off the HTML so that it is not included in the csv? Thanks, -Eric

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ericshufro 51 on at

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Re: Building a flow to export a SharePoint List to CSV and send emails - Issue - JSON present the CSV due to multiple choice items.

Additionally, how do i 'update' the file if it already exists. Using Create File will fail if the file exists. I would like to update it to a new version instead of first deleting it (which invalidates past links) and recreating it. Thanks, -Eric

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ericshufro 51 on at

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Re: Building a flow to export a SharePoint List to CSV and send emails - Issue - JSON present the CSV due to multiple choice items.

Instead of writing back the comma delimited people picker display names to a List field (as shown above), can we instead write it to an array variable? I have been trying all day with limited success. Please try creating a people column, populating it with several entries, and then using an array to populate the comma delimited display names in to the csv? Thanks. -e

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v-duann-msft on at

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Re: Building a flow to export a SharePoint List to CSV and send emails - Issue - JSON present the CSV due to multiple choice items.

Hi @ericshufro

Thank you for update.

1.How do i 'update' the file if it already exists

Actually, the first four columns are the main menu. The last 'peopleupdated' text column is additional column which is used to temp store persons' display name as string. So, from your end, I believe you can manually create one more column which functions as the same.

2.Can we instead write it to an array variable?

This is my original idea too. But while testing, I encountered duplicate issue and can't figure it out. After many attempts, I finally determine to use current method instead.

How can i strip off the HTML so that it is not included in the csv?

For this part, I'm still testing and if it's feasible, I will post the solution asap.

Thank you very much for reading my content. Hope it helps. 😀

Best regards,

Anna

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ericshufro 51 on at

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Re: Building a flow to export a SharePoint List to CSV and send emails - Issue - JSON present the CSV due to multiple choice items.

Thanks for the reply Anna.

When i said update, i meant replace the file in SharePoint. At the moment, if the file exists in SharePoint, an error will occur. Locally, I am deleting the file and then creating the file. I would rather create a new version, 'update' the file in SharePoint.

I removed the HTML by disabling rich text for the multi-line and single line text fields. Couldn't figure out a better way and it was easy since rich text wasnt required.

One challenge with updating the content of the List to store the DisplayName(s) is that there are other 'required' fields that must also be updated. For the choice fields, one cannot select from dynamic content; at least the current value of the form is not suggested and therefore updating the record with the display names isnt yet plausible.

On my end, I have a list of suppliers and I would like to customize the email send to each supplier. I could do this as a CSV for each (stored in memory, not written to SharePoint), or as an HTML table in each email.

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