How to Dynamically Get Email Addresses from a Dataverse Record Owner (User or Team)
In Microsoft Dataverse, many records have an Owner field that controls access and often receives notifications when something about the record changes.
When you first build a Power Automate flow to send an email to a record owner, you quickly realize a complication:
The Owner field can reference either an individual User or a Team.
If you don't account for this difference, your flow could break—or worse, send no notifications at all.
Here’s a method for dynamically identifying the owner type and getting the correct email addresses, whether it’s a single user or an entire team.
Step 1 — Create a String Variable
Start by initializing a string variable to hold the email address(es).
I typically name it something like varEmailAddress for clarity.
Step 2 — Check the Owner Type
When you retrieve your record (using Get a row by ID or List rows), examine the Owner (Type) field.
This field tells you if the owner is a User (systemuser) or a Team (team).
Create a Condition step in your flow:
Check if Owner (Type) equals
"team".This will allow you to branch your logic based on whether you're dealing with a team or an individual.
Step 3 — If the Owner is an Individual (User)
This is the simpler case.
Use a Get a row by ID step with the following inputs:
Table Name: Users
Row ID:
Owner (Value)Select Columns:
internalemailaddress
Then, Set Variable to update varEmailAddress with the user's primary email address (internalemailaddress).
Step 4 — If the Owner is a Team
This case requires a few more steps because you must retrieve all team members associated with the team.
Get a Row by ID for the Team:
Table Name: Teams
Row ID:
Owner (Value)Expand Query:
teammembership_association($select=internalemailaddress)
Tip:
The teammembership_association is the many-to-many relationship name between Teams and Users.
To find it, go to the Teams table, filter by Many-to-Many Relationships, and locate the relationship pointing to the Users table.
2. Apply to Each:
Use an Apply to Each control to loop over the expanded team member results.
Set the array input to:
outputs('Get_a_row_by_ID_Team')?['body/teammembership_association']
(Notice: You reference the relationship name directly after 'body/'.)
3. Inside the Loop:
Add a Compose action to view the current item.
Then use Append to String Variable to append each user's email address:
outputs('Compose')?['internalemailaddress']
Why This Matters
This approach:
Works whether the owner is a User or a Team without hardcoding anything.
Makes your flows much more flexible and reliable.
Provides a method you can reuse anytime you work with many-to-many relationships in Dataverse.
Final Thoughts
Handling Dataverse ownership logic may feel tricky at first—but a few simple checks and the right expansion queries will make your Power Automate flows more resilient and dynamic.
This method has saved me hours of debugging, and I hope it helps you too!
