Populate SharePoint List multiple choice column with Microsoft 365 Group names

Recently, a customer asked me if I could automagically 🦄 populate Microsoft 365 Group Names to a multiple choice column in a SharePoint list. Of course I told them that one can create an ootb Person field and allow group selection, but that was not quite what they wanted. So I built a simple Power Automate flow that would populate the choice column and applied some nice list formatting to it.

Prerequisites

• Have a SharePoint list
• Create a Choice column (I named mine Group)
• Under More options flip the switch Allow multiple selections to Yes

The Power Automate flow

We will use non-Premium connectors, first leveraging the Azure AD Group connector (time for a rename @Microsoft, huh?) to get all the groups, then use the SharePoint connector to send a request via SharePoint REST API. Let’s get started!

Get your groups

• We trigger the flow as per our needs (manually, if there is not a lot of change in groups) or on a schedule (if there is a lot of changes in groups)
• we then initialize a variable (I used string, but you can also do an array) for the groupNames
• then we use the Azure AD Groups - List Groups action to list all groups. Filter if needed!
• Then we append the Name (and a comma) in a loop to our groupNames variable

Obtain listguid and fieldguid

Now we need to obtain 2 things

1. the listguid of our SharePoint list: Select the Settings gear ⚙️ on your list, List Settings, you will find it in the URL. The List guid sits right in between %7B and%7D (Of course there are a gazillion of other ways to obtain this, but that is a super easy one). If you like to, write this value into a variable - it looks just more neat and tidy!
2. the fieldguid of the field that we are trying to populate: You can either follow this post here or stick with me and:

• Use Send an HTTP request to SharePoint
  • Method: Get
  • URI:_api/web/Lists/GetById('@{variables('listGuid')}')/Fields

This will return a massive json object from which you can now find the id of the field you are interested in. Again, use a variable if you like to!

If you need this for several multiple choice columns, I suggest that you filter down your results array to the column that you are interested in and then select the id from that.

Patch the choice column

As a last step, we patch our choice column with the groupNames. As we comma-separated this variable, we need to make sure that we remove that comma now:

• Use Send an HTTP request to SharePoint
  • Method: Patch
  • URI:_api/Web/Lists(guid'listGuid')/Fields(guid'fieldguid')
  • Headers:
    • Accept: application/json;odata=verbose
    • Content-type: application/json;odata=verbose
• Body:

{
"__metadata": {
"type": "SP.FieldMultiChoice"
},
"FieldTypeKind":15,
"Choices": {'results':[@{substring(variables('groupNames'),0, sub(length(variables('groupNames')),1))}]}
}

If we now check in SharePoint, this looks good! Next time: Add some Listformatting to the column!

Sneak peek

Let me if you like it :-)