Hello, all!
I'm pretty new to the Power Automate scene and I'm running into some trouble.
This is the project I'm working on: Every Sunday, Power Automate will check a SharePoint staff directory and get all the birthdays of employees. Then, it'll filter all those birthdays until it finds only the ones that fall during that week. Then, it'll send out an email to those employees' supervisors with the birthdays listed. Ideally, if there aren't any birthdays found for that week, there won't be any emails composed/sent out. Here's what I have so far:
Here are the issues I'm trying to iron out:
- The birthdays in the SharePoint site are imported in the for yyyy-MM-dd format. I need to format these dates to MM-dd to compare them to the StartofCurrentWeek/EndofCurrentWeek variables I made...where do I put this conversion, and how do I do that? I've been trying various iterations of formatDateTime (with the "Birthday" variable, the "Birthdate" column 'oc9t' from the SharePoint site) and I haven't had much luck. I've also tried some TimeConversion elements but haven't progressed much--I keep getting various errors. It could be linked to the other issue I have:
- Some employees in the list don't have birthdays listed, so they come up blank on the SharePoint site. I've been getting errors that are along the lines of:
- Unable to process template language expressions in action 'Set_variable' inputs at line '0' and column '0': 'The template language function 'formatDateTime' expects its first parameter to be of type string. The provided value is of type 'Null'. Please see https://aka.ms/logicexpressions#formatdatetime for usage details.'.
To help avoid that error, I added the "Filter null birthdays" conditional you see. It stopped giving me the above error, but it still includes their names in the emails that it's sending out...and with that conditional added, it's taking close to an hour for the flow to run.
- Unable to process template language expressions in action 'Set_variable' inputs at line '0' and column '0': 'The template language function 'formatDateTime' expects its first parameter to be of type string. The provided value is of type 'Null'. Please see https://aka.ms/logicexpressions#formatdatetime for usage details.'.
I've seen folks suggest "ticks" on some other threads, so if that's a better/simpler solution, I would be extremely grateful for a brief walkthrough on how ticks work with just Month/Day timelines.
Thank you in advance for any help! Please let me know if you need any further information.
Bumping this with an update--I think I might understand why it's sending out emails with ALL the employees and their birthdays. ONE birthday is happening this week, so it's satisfied that condition...and then the way this flow is set up, it's listing out all birthdays because I haven't told it to keep looking at that range. In that Select birthday Filter Array towards the end, it's opened itself back up to every single birthday in the directory and emails all the supervisors with everyone's birthday year-round.
So this is what I have now, after a few days of messing with it:
I tried putting the "Birthday" variable in this Filter Array, but it's just listing all employees in the email with 07-28 for everyone's birthdays. It's a goofy thing, but it makes sense, since that IS a birthday it's found this week and that IS the variable it assigned it to.
So now my question is, how do I fix this? After the flow has filtered it down to those birthdays, how do I tell it to keep those filtered birthdays in the emails?
Thanks again for any help you're able to offer!
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