How to create complicated flow to create/update tasks in planner with data from excel sheet

[Anonymous]

Hello every body!

I'm pretty new to power automate, and I've been working on this project for weeks now because I can't get it to fully work so I finally decided to cave and ask some more knowledgeable people what to do.

In simple terms, I'm trying to create a flow that will compare all of the rows in an Excel sheet with a list of tasks from Planner, and will then either create or update a task depending on conditions. It's also a LOT of data it will be working with (hundreds of rows in the excel), so keeping the flow as efficient and concise as possible is a priority (don't worry, the flow won't actually be creating/updating multi-hundreds of tasks, as I have a filter system already in place for that, but it is a lot).

The main issue right now is setting it up to do the following:
1. Iterate through the filtered rows of the excel sheet

2. compare it against the current list of tasks

3. recognize if the value of column1 matches the value of any of the task titles from the task list
4. If no, then create a new task with the fields populated by values in other columns of the row the excel sheet is currently on
5. if yes, check other conditions in reference to both the excel item and the matching task item
6. depending on the results of the above conditions, either continue to create a new task or update the task if any data is different

I have had some success with this, but with the following persistent problems depending on which method I try:
1. It is only creating new tasks for one BucketID condition (I have three buckets in the planner list, and one of the task creation conditions checks if the matching task is within a certain bucket, and if not it will create that task in that bucket or just creating a task in a certain bucket if it doesn't match any titles)
2. It takes waaaaay too long to complete the flow (and it keeps timing out)
3. it will create a new task for unmatched items, but does not recognize any matched items
4. it will create the same new task 5 times, despite having conditions that should prevent this (happens in nested apply to each actions)

Ideally, I would like to be able to check the Column1 and Titles of each array item, and then be able to grab the values of each item, without having to do nested arrays because it drastically lengthens the time to complete the flow. However, I understand that may not be possible, in which case i'm wondering how to stop it from re-making the same task again and again.

Here are some of the measures I have recently tried:

1. using 'select' action to make a key:value pair of the task list where the key is the task title and the value is the task ID

result: unable to recognize the 'key' name unless I compose all of the pairs into a string, can't figure out how to then refer to individual pair from there

2. when doing nested apply to each loops, instead of applying all of the conditions and further actions in that main yes/no condition, I broke it up: the main yes/no condition still has all subsequent conditions for creating or updating a task if there is a title match, but instead of also applying the steps to create a new task in the event of no matches, it now appends the excel row to an array variable which I then use in a separate apply to each loop afterwards to create new tasks.
Result: helped to cut down the time waiting for the nested apply to each loops to end, so I can debug sooner. I also added one single condition to check if the appended array already has the current task appended to it which briefly helped with the issue of multiple new tasks being created- until I tried to run it with the task list having matching task titles (was originally running it with a blank planner list to test that out, and then I moved on to trying it out when the tasks it just created are there).

3. before trying the nested loops, I was able to get it to create new tasks in multiple buckets- but I couldn't call the info of tasks with matching titles which i need. once I started trying to get that too, it only created tasks in one bucket

I'm sure most of this doesn't make any sense, so i'm happy to answer any questions you have. I will also try to post pictures of my current flow if you ask, but I'm avoiding that right now because A) it's a mess of steps (mostly variables) from different iterations I kept, so I could easily go back to a version that worked better without having to manually. select. each. new. action. again. and B) I am working with sensitive data, and I don't want to accidentally share something I shouldn't. I'm hoping that someone will just be able to steer me in the right direction, and then I can supply extra details in small supply as needed, especially as i'm pretty sure most of my expressions are sound- it's just the steps i'm having trouble wrangling.


Thank you in advance! Especially if you made it through reading all of that!!