Flow and PowerApps to add a collection of events to Oultook Calendar

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I was unsure where the adequate place to post my question is as it involves both PowerApps and Flow, but I am hoping someone can help 🙂 

Currently I have a gallery in PowerApps consisting of all the events a user would like to add to their Outlook Calendar. All of the events in the gallery are also stored in a PowerApps collection. Upon clicking an "Add all" button in PowerApps, I would like my flow diagram to add all of these events to the Oultook Calendar. 

I know how to create a flow diagram that successfully adds an individual event; however, I do not know how to create a flow diagram that adds a collection of events to Outlook Calendar. 

Any help would be much appreciated,

Kenzie 

[edgonzales]

Following...

[v-lin-msft]

Hi @Anonymous,

You can add multiple events to your Outlook Calendar by creating this configuration to your flow:

• The event subject, the start time and end time can be defined dynamically, depending on your gallery stored in a PowerApps collection. If you want to get the value, you can refer to this link #functions-in-expressions.
• The content of the event body needs to set the Current item of the trigger body.You can have a try with it. If there is any problem, please contact us.

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _ Lin Tu

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous]

Hi @v-lin-msft, 

I replaced the Subject, Start Time, End Time, and Reminder fields in my flow to ask PowerApps for these values. Each of the events in the collection I have displayed in the PowerApps gallery has different corresponding values for these fields. Here is my current flow:   However, once I link this flow diagram to the button I have in PowerApps, it does not allow me to input paramters for the .Run() function.

I tried testing this and received this error: 

[MarkStokes]

Ooh. I like this one. I’ll try to build a solution tomorrow when I’m back in the office.

- Mark

[v-lin-msft]

Hi @Anonymous,

Could you check the output of the trigger, please?

You can do that by adding action "Compose".

E.g.

This allows you to see the types of data you receive.

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _ Lin Tu

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous]

Hi @v-lin-msft , 

The inputs and outputs for the Compose action only contained information for the first event in my PowerApps collection. I still of course am receiving the same error for the Apply to Each action. 

I found online that I may have to concatenate a long string consisting of the collection, pass it to Flow, and then parse it in flow. I tried doing this on my own, but then again I am unsure how to execute this and if it is the most ideal solution. 

Thank you,

Kenzie

[MarkStokes · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous 

As I understand it, your requirement is to have a Gallery made from a collection. The Gallery allows you to send individual items to a Flow for processing. But you would also like to have the option to "Send All" to the Flow for batch processing? In your requirments you talk about Calendar items, but in my demo here I am using simple data types to keep it simple. I am sure you can replace the fields with relevant calendar type fields.

Firstly, I have a PowerApp with a collection of items that I initialise in the App OnStart. Obviously, this could be loaded dynamically.

Then I build up a Gallery to show these items:

Here, I have a normal Title and Description fields on the gallery, but I have also added another Label called JSON and the Text Property of that Label is:

"[{""title"":"""&ThisItem.title&""",""description"":"""&ThisItem.description&"""}]"

This may look confusing, but I am building up an "Array of JSON objects" that describe my item. In your case it will be an event so you will have fields like Title, StartTime, EndTime, Description, Location, etc. The reason I have lots and lots of speach marks is that I want to include speech marks in my text, so I have to escape them, by putting two speach marks where I want one to appear! Confusing, right?  The output of that muddle of code would be something like:

[{"title":"Title 1","description":"Description 1"}]

Of course, I would set the Visibility of this label control to invisible.

Now, we are ready to pass that to our Flow. So, lets take a look at what that looks like

We ask for a single string input from PowerApps (our JSON text) Then we Parse JSON so we have an object in Flow that we can query the properies of. When using this, just get a normal copy of your JSON text click the "Use sample payload to generate schema" and paste it in there and it will generate the schema for you.

Then we do an Apply to Each. The JSON is wrapped with an Array construct (the square braces [] ) to tell it that there might be more than one (see where this is going?). In the case of the gallery we will just send a collection (or array) with a single item.

So now, in the PowerApp we can call our Flow like this:

And our Flow runs like a dream.

So, now we want a Send All button to send all the items in the collection in one go.

Firstly, we need a JSON Array with all the items in. We add another Label to the PowerApps form and use this in the Text property:

"["&
Concat(myItems, "{""title"":"""&title&""",""description"":"""&description&"""}",",")
&"]"

This biulds up a similar JSON string, but one for each item in our collection. If you wanted to extend this further you could put checkboxes in your gallery and then replace myItems with a Filter on your Gallery to just include the items that the user has checked. Your requirements was All Items though.

This generates the following JSON in our Label control:

[
  {
    "title": "Item 1",
    "description": "Desc 1"
  },
  {
    "title": "Item 2",
    "description": "Desc 2"
  },
  {
    "title": "Item 3",
    "description": "Desc 3"
  }
]

Because we built our Flow to handle multiple items in the first place, then we can just send this to it and it will work just as well as with the individual ones on the Gallery.

And the Flow:

Hope this helps!