Send a emails based on choices workflow? Please help!

[DGWolfe]

Hi all,

Firstly, I have ZERO clue what I am doing with power automate. I make power apps, but the other person in my team who does the workflows is sick and I have been asked to try and Help. So far, I am pulling my hair out.

We have a workflow power app, whereby the user will review a request, and select three choices (choices are in a choice column in a SharePoint list):

Tentative approval

Requires more information

Declined

I have been asked to create a flow that will trigger an email response based on the choice.

E.g. user selects Tentative approval, work flow sends tentative approval email template. However, if they choose decline, then the decline template is sent.

I have watched videos and read posts and I thought I had it but no. Below are the screen shots, but it keeps saying my condition "Has column changed" is equal to true (this is the pointing to the choice column)  keeps returning as false? Yet, the choice update is writing back to the column fine? Why would this keep returning false?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

DW

    

[trice602 · Accepted solution]

Hi @DGWolfe ,

Let me know if this works for you - I'm collecting kudos and solution badges; always glad to help!  Tom

[trice602]

Here's the switch expression details:

[DGWolfe]

@trice602 

Thanks Tom! I worked! It actually worked! 

Question, if a user changes the status a few times, will the above flow trigger new emails? Or does there need to be more added to keep it dynamically updating each time the status is changed?

DW

[DGWolfe]

@Tom, please ignore, I answered my own question! It dynamically updates. Legend! Thank you so much. 

I do have another 2 if you are up for helping?

[trice602]

I'm here, this is also my hobby on a Friday night LOL.  Yes, start a new question and I will look and respond tonight!  Always glad to help!  Tom

[DGWolfe]

@trice602 one final thing. I have noticed this work flow is triggering every time a change is made to this request. I only want it to trigger if there's a change to this specific column when the choice is changed.

[trice602]

Understood, I see that also while working on the second flow.  

[trice602 · Accepted solution]

Hi @DGWolfe ,

I made some changes to the first flow to address only changes to the Choices1 column.  There are a few ways to do this and this one seems to be the less complicated and does work in all the test scenarios.  Here you have to add a helper column, in my case I used Choices_Chngs.  Your conditional statement has two OR conditions:

* Created date/time equals Modified date/time (for new rows these values match)

OR

* Choices1 does not equal Choices_Chngs (for modified Choices1 column only)

Then as the end of your Switch (when the conditional was true, you write the value of Choices1 to Choices_Chngs) - this helps look for those changes only to the Choices1 column next time this row is updated.

Make this update on your flow and confirm:

1) new item sends an email under each of your three cases;

2) modifying choice value sends an email;

3) modifying other columns does not send an email

This is going to help out with the 2nd flow because now we can make changes to the Status and Appended Comment columns without the 1st flow firing emails every time something changes.

[DGWolfe]

Legend @trice602! This now fires perfectly! Thank you 🙂

[trice602]

I'm going to finish the 2nd robot tonight! 🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖

[trice602]

@DGWolfe ,

Here's the improved flow version.  Supposedly it is better because it never fires if the conditions are not true.  The condition control step is removed and the conditions in the trigger settings.  It does still use the helper column - I was unable to understand how it might work without it - but this looks good to me.

Your trigger conditions in the settings of trigger When a new item is created or modified:

@or(equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/Created'], triggerOutputs()?['body/Modified']), not(equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/Choices1/Value'], triggerOutputs()?['body/Choices_Chgs'])))

Let me know if this works for you - always glad to help!  Tom

[DGWolfe]

@trice602 Hi Tom,

Thanks for looking at those other flows. I will get to those shortly. Quick question we have an outage nationally (AUS) over the weekend and everything came to a halt. Everything is up and running now, but this flow is repeating over and over sending x10 of the same email. Should this be happening or is this a result of the outage maybe?

[trice602]

Just crashing for the night and sorry to hear.  I suspect this is from the outage and not flow related - I have seen weird stuff like that before.  I am assuming this is flow #1 - steps to resolve:

1) stop the flow;

2) review last successful run and see what row it is referencing;

3) review that row in the list and verify the Choices column matches the Choices_Chgs column and/or update the Choices_Chgs column to match the Choice column.  This is part of the trigger condition (or previous version's condition control) so if they don't match it will fire again.

The flow most likely is out of sync and during the outage, the update item was not successful. Always glad to help! Tom

[trice602]

Circling back on this with an important note:  Write a quick flow that updates the choices_chgs, status_chgs, team_chngs to the value of the respective choices, status, and team.  That's because when you update the change helper column at the end of the flows, it updates the item which triggers the flow to run again because these values don't match for existing items (they were blank to begin with and that's why your flow will keep launching).  In testing, since I was using a blank list, I didn't have any existing data.  That will wrap up all three of these for you.  Tom

[DGWolfe]

@trice602 this is great! Thank you so much for the follow up 🙂