How to use a loop until the response value is not equal to

[PeterKl]

Hi all,

I have create below flow, which runs every hour.

In the first HTTP action I retrieve all Deployment events with a starting date in the previous hour. This might provide me several events as several deployments are started during that last hour.
This is the action:
https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/deviceManagement/autopilotEvents?$filter=microsoft.graph.DeviceMana...')}
In the second HTTP action, I retrieve some additional information regarding every event and than I use a third HTTP action to POST a message to Teams with the information I gathered.

This all runs fine. But the events can have a status of Success, Failed or inProgress. 
It's OK to post the message when the status is Success or Failed, but actually I don't want to post the message when the status is inProgress. The enrollment isn't finished and I actually want to post a message when the status changes to success or failed.
I thought about using an Until action for this. As every event is marked with an unique ID, I can run another HTTP GET action and use that ID in the filter:
https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/deviceManagement/autopilotEvents?$filter=((contains(id,'[ID]')))
But that puts my HTTP + Parse JSON action in a For each (as the ID can be present in the output of the first HTTP Action) and I'm not able to use the values from that new Parse JSON action as value for the Until action.

Does anybody know how to solve this?

Thanks in advance!

Peter

[PrasadAthalye]

You can declare a variable for Until loop. To start with, variable will be empty OR some default value which does not match until condition. Then after Parse JSON, you can set the variable to actual value so that loop can continue.

Finally you can set until condition to exit the loop. Please note that its Do Until condition and not do while. 

Example Until Status does not equals 'Completed' will run till the status is set to Completed.

[PeterKl]

Hi @PrasadAthalye thanks for your reply. Much appreciated!

I tried to use a Variable, but maybe I did something wrong with that, as it didn't work as expected. My flow looks like this with a variable:

The thing with above flow is, when multiple events are retrieved, the Until is finished for all events as soon as one of the events hits a Success/ Failure status. I expected the event with inProgress status to continue the Until loop until that event also hits Success or Failure. 

If only one event is received, the until action works fine. So the thing is, how to split this up so every event with the until action is handled separate?

Thanks,

Peter

[PrasadAthalye]

Ok I think you can achieve this with simple approach. Because you essentially do not want to notify for In Progress events. It can be done without until because you are on a scheduled trigger. 

• Get All your events with the filter not equal to In progress.
• Send notifications for all of them.
• Next time when your flow runs on a schedule, it will continue to filter new Success\Failure status events and you can notify. This can continue until all In progress events are done.

Do you think this approach will work?

[PeterKl]

Thanks for your response.

What kind of filter should I use for this. I now filter the events from the past hours (already in the GET HTTP Action url), because when I don't do that I get all events from the last 30 days. By using that filter, at least I'm sure I only get new events.

Thanks,

Peter

[PrasadAthalye]

I understand. Some filter additional to existing one that filters output by status not equals to in progress.

[eliotcole]

@PeterKl , I'm just looking through this, and one of the key drawbacks to something you mentioned was that  wanted to do something but couldn't due to the for each part.

Well, you can select array items using "[1]" in functions.

I'm going to take a more in-depth look at it to see if there's an easy solution, here, but if there is I have a sneaking suspicion that picking the right array item might be that solution. 🙂

----

Further editing to ask perhaps a silly question followed by a suggestion based on that question answer being 'yes' 😉:

1. Could you utilise a separate SharePoint list to just process the data?
2. Then have a separate flow post the Teams messages based on the status of a given [id]'s in the list?

I'm not discounting that there's a way to do this with the JSON arrays in the flow (and I'm still looking at that), but this would definitely simplify the logic for you and potentially show you the answer with the JSON data.

It would also give you decent archival data on them.

----

OK, it can definitely be done with arrays, but it got too painful for me to carry on figuring out the logic for you.

Essentially, though, I would start by splitting your data into two sets that you'll work with in separate branches:

1. Branch One; takes all the initial results that are completed or Failed and processes them immediately into Teams messages.
2. Branch Two; only takes all the initial results that are "In-Progress" and creates a secondary array to work on.

Now you only have one set of data that you need to concentrate on, Branch Two. 🙂

(you can alternatively build a master array and add both branches to it to spam the teams thread all at once, too)

You can then work on whittling down the second set of data using a third array variable (that gets wiped on each iterative turn of the UNTIL action), and once that array is emptied of "In-Progress" statuses you can set a boolean 'isGood' variable to true, and the UNTIL can stop.

I think one of my previous posts handles whittling an array, however that's a whole 'nother thing, and I genuinely don't have the spare brain matter to push at it right now. But I'm not here to get points, just hope that what little I do say can help point you in the right direction.

Sorry I can't be more specific, but I started to build it out, and then realised I'd have to start faking your data input, and honestly, it was too much work. 😅 

I would definitely advise, though, creating a SharePoint list to just iterate through what's new/in-progress/done, and work from there, though.

Hope you get it sorted, however you do it! 🙂

[PeterKl]

First of all, thanks for your long reply!

It's already hard for me to get test data, as it involves a device enrollment and the inProgress status isn't there forever 🙂

I'm not sure what you mean my this. I'm only working with flows for a couple of months
"You can then work on whittling down the second set of data using a third array variable (that gets wiped on each iterative turn of the UNTIL action), and once that array is emptied of "In-Progress" statuses you can set a boolean 'isGood' variable to true, and the UNTIL can stop."

As I don't prefer a solution with a SharePoint, I can create one. But I guess instead of using a filter (expression) in the first HTTP GET action to only retrieve the events from the latest hour, I need to get all events? Which means I get hundreds of events in the list.
And than I need to make sure that the flow which retrieves the events compares the retrieved values with the ones in the SP list. When the SP List event has a value of inProgress and the retrieved value is success/ failed, need to change the status on the SP List.
A second flow would check the SP List for changed items and process these, but only when the status is success/ failure.