when item is modified, flow sending emails before condition is met

[Wallwood7]

Hello to whom it may concern

I have created a flow that sends an email based on a condition, the condition being that if an item in my SharePoint list has been approved and the target completion date value is empty then an email is sent to say Target completion date needs to be filled in. there is also an approval message flow that sends emails if a response has not been approved, 1 after 7 days and one after 14, for the purpose of testing I have set this to 1 minute and 2 minutes.

I have been having some trouble where if I go to submit a new response it will send a target completion date email before the criteria has been met I think this is because the previous response is now valid to be checked for its date as it is no longer a new request. for example, lets say I have 3 items with no target completion date and I go to submit a 4th one, one i receive the option to approve the response I am sent an email after 1 minute to ask why it has not been approved, before I receive the second approval check I get 3 target completion date emails for my previous responses, once I approve the message I am then sent 4 emails which is correct, basically I should not be receiving the 3 emails before the second approval and I don't know why I am.

Below are some pictures that should help explain my point, I would greatly appreciate some help on this.

Kind regards

Emails (Some personal information blocked)

Flow (Approver, Get Items from Approval Matrix and Apply to each 4 are for my email groups and are not why this flow is breaking)

SharePoint

[creativeopinion · Accepted solution]

@Wallwood7 I would recommend adding trigger conditions to your flow trigger to check if the SP Item is approved and the target completion date value is empty. Without trigger conditions your flow will trigger anytime a change is made to an item in your SP list. Rather than always triggering your flow when an item changes—only trigger it for when you want to trigger it.

4 Ways You Can Use Trigger Conditions in Your Microsoft Power Automate Flow

If you are using an Automated Cloud flow trigger in your flow—you need to consider adding trigger conditions.

Do YOU 🫵 know what a trigger condition is? Trigger conditions can be set in most flow triggers. These conditions you set must be true for the trigger to fire. In this Power Automate tutorial, I’m going to show you how to use trigger conditions in your flows to control when your Power Automate flows trigger.

If your plan has flow run limits—you can avoid triggering your flows unnecessarily by using trigger conditions.

I’ll cover four different flow examples that would benefit from trigger conditions:

⚡️ Triggering a flow when a column is changed to a specific value

⚡️ Triggering a Flow When an Event Updated or Deleted

⚡️ Triggering a Flow When a New Folder is Created

⚡️ Triggering a Flow When a Specific Email is Received I’ll also show you a trick on how to easily create the expressions needed and give you a few tips on how to troubleshoot your flow.

IN THIS VIDEO:

✅ Four different flows that would benefit from trigger conditions

✅ What is a trigger condition?

✅ How to add a trigger condition to your flow

✅ How to trigger a flow when a column is changed to a specific value

✅ How to trigger a flow when an event is updated or Deleted

✅ How to trigger a flow when a new folder is created

✅ How to trigger a flow when a specific email is received

✅ How to troubleshoot a trigger condition

✅ How to prevent case sensitivity issues with a trigger condition

✅ How to use the filter array action to easily compose an expression that can be used in a trigger condition

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Additionally, it's not efficient to loop through all your items and run a condition check on each item to see if the item meets your criteria. Instead, use a filter query to filter out the items you want to loop through. 

You will need to use the internal column names of your columns. Keep in mind that the internal column name may not always match the name displayed in your Sharepoint list. If you aren't sure how to get the Internal Column name, you can refer to this section of one of my YT Tutorials.

If you aren't sure how to write a filter query—check out this YT short.

Hope this helps!

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