Clear Multi User field in SharePoint using REST API

I covered most types of fields previously but I didn’t cover the clear multi user field problem in SharePoint Online.

Clearing fields

A while back I wrote a post about clearing fields in Microsoft Flow. For details on how to update fields please look at the previous post.

Clear Multi user fields

I tried all sorts of ways but I kept hit all sorts of failures in my REST API call to SharePoint.

A collection of the errors that I saw:

An unexpected ‘StartObject’ node was found when reading from the JSON reader. A ‘PrimitiveValue’ node was expected.

A node of type ‘PrimitiveValue’ was read from the JSON reader when trying to read the contents of an entity set reference navigation link; however, a ‘StartObject’ or ‘StartArray’ node was expected.

A node of type ‘StartArray’ was read from the JSON reader when trying to read the contents of a resource reference navigation link; however, a ‘StartObject’ node or ‘PrimitiveValue’ node with null value was expected.

It was not until I looked at how to update a multi user field and then combined this with the how to reset a user field that I got to the solution. In my case I’ve got afield called CheckedBy.

Clear Multi User fields in SharePoint using REST API

The important bit in the above screenshot is the setting the Id to -1 and the StringId part of the field to an empty string.

'CheckedById': {
  '__metadata': {
    'type': 'Collection(Edm.Int32)'
  },
  'results': [
    -1
  ]
},
'CheckedByStringId': {
'__metadata': {
  'type': 'Collection(Edm.String)'
},
  'results': [
  '' ]
}

Ok, this is great, problem solved!

By Pieter Veenstra

Business Applications and Office Apps & Services Microsoft MVP working as a Microsoft Productivity Principal Consultant at HybrIT Services. You can contact me using contact@veenstra.me.uk.

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