How to update multiple people or group column in Power Automate
“I want to update a multi-selection people picker field with the results of a different SharePoint list using Power Automate.”
‘Person or Group’ SharePoint column is one of the complicated ones to update using Power automate. When it’s just one user, it works fine. But once you try to update multiple people, it gets more complicated. You can’t use simply the dynamic from another item, or list of email addresses of the users either. The ‘Update item’ action requires an array with email addresses in the following format.
[
{ "Claims": "user1@company.com" },
{ "Claims": "user2@company.com" }
]It’s just one of the user properties available, so how to extract it?
‘Select’ action
The easiest way is to use ‘Select’ action. This action expects an array, e.g. the dynamic content with multiple users. By default, the dynamic content contains multiple users with multiple properties. You can see an example below.
[
{
"@odata.type": "#Microsoft.Azure.Connectors.SharePoint.SPListExpandedUser",
"Claims": "i:0#.f|membership|user1@company.com",
"DisplayName": "User One",
"Email": "user1@company.com",
"Picture": "https://..."
},
{
"@odata.type": "#Microsoft.Azure.Connectors.SharePoint.SPListExpandedUser",
"Claims": "i:0#.f|membership|user2@company.com",
"DisplayName": "User Two",
"Email": "user2@company.com",
"Picture": "https://..."
}
],Using the ‘Select’ action, you can select only the properties you need and skip the rest. Here you’re interested only in the ‘Claims’ property. You’ll tell the action: “take the whole array of ‘Approvers’, and select only ‘Approver email’ for each of them. And map the property to ‘Claims’ key”. Output of the action can be then used to update the column.
Update: if you’d like to update only one, person or group column, you can do that with an HTTP request.
Summary
Taking users from multiple people picker column is the easy way to update another multiple people picker. You already got all the data you need in an array, you just need to reduce it. Keep only the email with proper key, and that’s it.
It’s one of the basic functionalities when building approval processes based on configuration lists, updating users for scheduled task reminders, or just keeping lists synchronized.