Delay Until 2am

[tomh]

Hello All:

I have a simple Approval flow that triggers upon recurrence every 3 days. It gets file properties and if file approval=pending it sends email to approver for approval. Our biggest challenge is that users are often in the files needing to be approved. Therefor when the the approver approves and the flow tries to update the file properties to 'Approve' it cannot do so because the file is locked for editing. The flow continues and errors but the approver is not aware of the fact that the file properties have not been updated. Then again on the third day they receive an email for approval of the same file because the properties are still=pending becuase the file was locked for editing and the metadata could not be updated on previous attempt. I have worked with this flow for months now and have tried just about everything. The only thing I have left is to try to add some kind of delay function into the flow to update the file properties at a specific time when the least amount of users are potentially in the file, say 2am. 

I am open to options here. I have not been able to successfully implement a delay in such a way that would only update at 2am. The closest I have been able to get is to delay updating for a given amount of hours say 10 hours. This presents a problem as well as hours of business are roughly between 6am and 6pm. So even if an approver approves at 6am sharp the metadata would then be updated at 4pm, which still falls between our business hours thus potentially leaving the file locked for editing. 

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks all!

Tom

[Anonymous]

@tomh ,

I just tested this.

The Get Current Time action block returns the time when that action runs, not when the whole flow was executed.

However, it also looks like the expression utcNow() will return the current time, and not the time that the flow was executed.

So, you should be safe using either the output of a Get Current Time action block or the expression utcNow() within your expression calculating 2:00AM tomorrow morning.

thanks,
Kyle

[tomh]

@tom_riha 

Thank you for this! I have done my testing and this is working perfectly as expected! You are the man!

Thanks!

Tom

[MWibisono]

My flow took too long until a day:

Took a run start:

 

Target: 2023-12-19T10:00:00Z

Final email sent: