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.

5 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!