Outlook task to planner

[piersm2]

Hey everyone I need help with my flow.  It is creating the planner task, but I want to assign the planner task to the outlook task individual, but it is not working.  Can you assist me with this?  Also, I want to mark the planner task when the outlook task is completed.

[rmoore]

Hi @piersm2 ,

What are you using for your trigger?  Is this based on a calendar event or an email?

I tested with a calendar event and was able to assign each required attendee to the task.  You will need to create an Array of the attendees to iterate through (I used a Compose data function).

For some reason, if you try to do the split off of the Trigger Required Attendees field, Power Automate doesn't give you the option to chose the Required Attendees field.  So, if you put a Compose action in and set it to the Required Attendees value, you can then do a second Compose where you use the Split function.  The required attendees are separated by a Semi-colon, so use that as the character to split the string.  This will give you your Required Attendees array.

Then run an Apply To Each for the Output of the Array.  Keep in mind that in the Array above, I had 3 required attendees but it give me 4 entries, one that is blank.  To account for the blank, and not have an error thrown, use a Condition to check that each item is not blank.

 

Let me know if you have any questions.

[piersm2]

I am using a created outlook task to trigger the creation of the planner task.  Screen shot is what I want, but I need to pull out email address from the user profile to use in the "Assigned User Ids" box.  Thoughts?

[rmoore]

Got it.  One thing I noticed was if I created the Task in my "To Do" app, i didn't have the ability to assign the task to someone until the task was already created.  Thus, Assignee was always Blank ("Assignee":"").  However, if I created the task in my Outlook, I could assign the task to someone before it was created and that populated the Assignee field.

When added to the To Do app:

When added through Outlook:

If you are adding to the To Do app and you have to assign the task after it's created, you could try a Do Until condition and have it keep trying until the assignee isn't blank.  But I would suggest adding in Outlook and assigning before the task is created.

[rmoore]

UPDATE:

I realized I didn't answer the second part of the request - Update the Planner task as complete when the Outlook Task is marked as Complete.  I've built the full solution below, including assigning the Planner task to the Outlook task Assignee.

Start with the Trigger of creating a Task.  The assignee comes through as the Display Name.  You will need to search for the User with the Search For Users action in the Office 365 Users Connector.  From there you can create the Planner Task with the required details, using the Email returned from the Search for Users action.

You'll notice that I initialize a PlannerTaskId Variable.  This is needed for the final step of updating the status to Completed.  It is of type String.

The task has been created in Planner and assigned to the user.  Now we need to update the Planner Task when the Outlook Task is completed.  To do this, we will create a String Variable to hold the value of the "Status" of the task.  We'll then go through a Do Until Loop until the Status is "Completed".

A few things to note about the Do Until loop.

1. You will need an action in the loop or it will time out.  The Delay will add time between tries and the Set Variable will get the latest status of the Task.
2. The Count and Time Out fields for the loop.  The Count will perform the Do Until this many times.  I'm pretty sure the limit is 5000. 
3. The Time Out field is how long the Do Until loop will perform the action if it hasn't reached the Count limit. 

By default the 2 fields are 60 and 1 hour.

Finally, once the status of the Task has been updated to Completed, we now update the Planner Task as well.  Use the Update a Task Actgion and use the PlannerTaskID variable for the Task ID field. Set the Progress to complete and you should be good to go.