Expression Error: A cyclic reference was encountered during evaluation.-- Seek for help

[Anonymous]

Hi experts,

I am new to PBI and of course need some help with queries.  When I run the two quries below. I get the error message in the subject line.  When I run the first query or the second query ALONE, I don't get the error message.  I will greatly appreciate your help. 

#"Added Conditional Column1" = Table.AddColumn(#"Added Column", "Instructor_FN", each if Text.Length(ACADEMIC_HISTORY[INST_FIRST_NAME])=0 then ACADEMIC_HISTORY[FACULTY_FIRST_NAME] else ACADEMIC_HISTORY[INST_FIRST_NAME]),
#"Added Conditional Column2" = Table.AddColumn(#"Added Conditional Column1", "Instructor_LN", each if Text.Length(ACADEMIC_HISTORY[INST_LAST_NAME])=0 then ACADEMIC_HISTORY[FACULTY_LAST_NAME] else ACADEMIC_HISTORY[INST_LAST_NAME])

[AnalyticPulse · Accepted solution]

here is an alternative to your code, just replace these line from your code and let me know if it works:

#"Added Conditional Column1" = Table.AddColumn(#"Added Column", "Instructor_FN", each if Text.Length([INST_FIRST_NAME]) = 0 then [FACULTY_FIRST_NAME] else [INST_FIRST_NAME]),

#"Added Conditional Column2" = Table.AddColumn(#"Added Conditional Column1", "Instructor_LN", each if Text.Length([INST_LAST_NAME]) = 0 then [FACULTY_LAST_NAME] else [INST_LAST_NAME])

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[Anonymous]

It worked !!  Thank you so much !!  I've struggled with this issue for a while and was going crazy. ha!

Would you mind explaining why this was happening?   Just because specifying the table name in two different queries?