Saving and displaying multi-choice Combo Box in a Text field

It is well documented how to save the contents of a multi-select combo box to a Single Line of Text field, but not so how to successfully get the content back into the DefaultSelectedItems of the control.

I will do two examples here (both related) – one on a Choice field and the other on a list of items. Items referenced as follows

Text field being written to in the main list – TextField1
Choices field name being used – ChoiceField1
SharePoint list name SPList1
Name of the Combo Box – Combo1

Choice field

Choices(SPList1.ChoiceField1)

Items

Update of Data Card

Concat(
   Combo1.SelectedItems,
   Value, 
   ","
)

DefaultSelectedItems

Split(
   ThisItem.TextField1,
   ","
)

List Field

Next is a list based on a field from another List) – I will refer to the elements as follows

Text field being written to in the main list – TextField1
Second list name – SPList2
Text field in SPList2 being used as the Items of the drop-down – TextField2
Name of the Combo Box – Combo1

Items

Sort(
   SPList2.TextField2,
   TextField2
)

Update of Data Card

Concat(
   Combo1.SelectedItems,
   TextField2, 
   ","
)

DefaultSelectedItems

RenameColumns(
   Split(
      ThisItem.TextField1,
      ","
   ),
   "Value",
   "TextField2"
)

and that is about the extent of the process. I hope this is useful to you.

7 Comments

richard clowes

25/04/2022 at 11:39 pm Reply

Hi Warren…

Can you just explain in basic 101 language the purpose behind adding this…
Left(
wList,
Len(wList)-1
)

as a 2nd question…
I’m using a SP List and doing my defaultSelectedItems as …
Filter(TravelSites,Title in ThisItem.TravelSites)
That seems to work.
But when I change it to..
RenameColumns(Split(ThisItem.TravelSites, “;”), “Result”, “Title”)
it displays nothing.

I must be misunderstanding your logic.

Warren Belz

01/05/2022 at 6:27 am Reply

Hi Richard, as noted on the forum the first one is just to get rid of the last comma. You are using a different model on the second item (my example was for a Choice field)

Gabriel

07/09/2022 at 7:52 am Reply

This is great I used List Field option and worked just fine.

Thanks.

Shivshankar Pujari

14/11/2022 at 6:09 pm Reply

Hello Warren, I tried your 2nd example and it worked for me thank you .

Deborah Shaffer

07/03/2023 at 9:52 am Reply

The second one worked! Yeah! Thank you!

A Power apps Newbie

05/03/2025 at 10:24 pm Reply

I have a multi value combo box, but the values came from Office365Users.SearchUser();
I would like to Display the name instead of the email, is there a way to to this?

eg
jon.snow@domain.com,arya.starkz@domain.com

I would like the combo box to display
[ Jon Snow ][ Arya Stark ]

Thank you.

Warren Belz

06/03/2025 at 8:24 am Reply

You can certainly store it (using DisplayName instead of Value), but the DefaultSelectedItems would present challenges as you need to get the full table back, which is not possible with just the DisplayName. This is one of the times that the best option is to simply use the built-in Person multi-value field and let Power Apps do it for you.