Calculate date to send reminder email

[shighland]

I have a Power Automate flow where when a new Microsoft Form is submitted it creates an item in a SharePoint List. I need to send reminder emails one week from the entered Meeting Date. The MeetingDate column is a Single text column and is written to the list as 'yyyy-mm-dd'. I'm trying to Initialize Variable in Power Automate to addDays('SharePointColumnName','-3','yyyy-MM-dd'). I am receiving an error: "Unable to process template language expressions in action 'Initialize_variable' inputs at line '0' and column '0': 'The template language function 'addDays' expects its second parameter to be an integer. The provided value is of type 'String'." I tried to change the column to be an integer, but this isn't working either. Any ideas of how to accomplish the goal? I need to calculate one week before the meeting date then have another PA workflow look to that column to send a reminder when date=today.

[Nived_Nambiar]

Hi @shighland 

The error means that the second parameter in addDays should be an integer not a string as it represents the number of days to be added/subtracted

addDays('SharePointColumnName',-3,'yyyy-MM-dd')

[shighland]

Hi Nived,

Thanks for the reply. How do I subtract days then in Power Automate? I am looking to calculate the date one week before the Meeting Date. Looking in other forums, it stated you can subtract days to the expression by adding the (-) sign.

[Nived_Nambiar · Accepted solution]

Hi @shighland 

the same expression which i have shared earlier would work

taking an example: assume we have a date 2023-03-20 , i want to get date one week before (ie 7 days)

Now I will use the following expression to calculate date one week before given date 

addDays('2023-03-20',-7,'yyyy-MM-dd')

This will give me result as 2023-03-13

Here you have to replace the hardcoded value 2023-03-20 with dynamic content that has been retrived from sharepoint in your case to make it work

Hope it helps

Mark it as solution if it resolves your query 🙂