Flag a person who accidentally signs out without signing in

[CheriV]

Hi, I currently have a sign-in/out system that only captures people who are signed in. Once a person signs out, the sign in record is deleted. This is aimed for emergency response purposes. If an emergency occurs, we simply show the list to the emergency response team, then we'll have an accurate headcount of the people we need to account for.

My concern is when a person intends to "sign in" but accidentally selects "sign out". The way my current flow is made, a sign out without a sign in does not create a record. If this happens and there is an emergency, the person will not be accounted for.

I am wondering if there's a way to flag/notify a person who signs out without signing in. 

Thanks!

[WillPage]

You haven't said much about the mechanism people use to sign in and sign out - is this a Power App, or do you have something simpler like a button activated flow on people's phones?

You could just have one flow and a single sign in/out button. When someone taps it you add an item if they're not already in the list and delete the item if they are. It's quite hard to ensure data integrity with whatever method you choose though, as people often forget.
We used to have a geofence trigger in Power Automate - it was in preview but it worked and the output of the trigger had the direction they crossed the boundary. It was a good solution for an automated sign-in/out flow, but sadly Microsoft deemed us unworthy of such a feature and removed it.

[CheriV]

Hi @WillPage, it is a Microsoft Form that leads to an Excel File. I used Power Automate to connect the 2. Please see the attached png in my original message to see what I have done in Power Automate so far. Thank you!

[WillPage]

I see. You remove the sign out/sign in choice and have a List rows present in a table action with a filter query like Concatenate eq '.......' where all those answers are between the single quotes like you have with the Delete action.

Then your condition instead of looking at the sign in/out choice, use the length() function to measure the number of rows returned from the previous action. The length will be 0 when they are signing in, because there's no matching row, or 1 when they are signing out because there is a matching row.

[CheriV]

Hi Will, thanks for your suggestion. I am a total newbie and I'm afraid I need more guidance on your instructions above. Could you perhaps provide more info/screenshots so I can understand? Thank you so much for your help!

[WillPage]

Use the action called List rows present in a table. Select the correct values for Location, Document Library, File and Table to reach your Excel file. Now expand the advanced options and put something in the filter query like Concatenate eq '......' where Concatenate is the name of your column and the bit between the single quotes is all the dynamic content from your form response, in the exact same way you've done it for your Delete row action.

Here is an example. I have not connected a form so I have used dynamic content from the button trigger for the purpose of an example. Obviously yours will look different:

Now, you can evaluate the response with this expression:

You can go to the Expression tab of the popup, type length() then put the cursor between the brackets, switch to the Dynamic content tab and find the value property of your List rows action:

Now in the Yes branch of the condition, put the delete action in there and in the No branch you create the row. You don't need to change anything within Yes and No branches in your flow if it still looks like your screen shot.

Now you can remove the question from the form whether it's a sign in or sign out because you are no longer using that information.