Flow run displays correctly but SharePoint List contains differently

[Y_R]

Hello All,

I am experiencing a peculiar issue which I cannot wrap my head around. I am working with two SharePoint Lists entitled:

1. Employee Annual Leave: holds current employee leave balances

2. Leave Request Form: holds all leave requests submitted by employees

I created a Flow to set the leave balance from the Employee Annual Leave list, "When an item is created" in the Leave Request Form list, based on the leave type of this request. When a request is submitted and I check this Flow after it runs, the Flow displays everything correctly: it triggers "When an item is created" in the Leave Request Form list, then it "Get items" from the Employee Annual Leave list filtering by employee name, then it checks what type of leave the employee applied for using a switch control, and finally a column entitled BalanceCopy is updated with the leave balance value fetched from the "Get Items" via "Update item" of the particular request that was initially created. The image below illustrates this set up:

The following images are the results of a successful run of this Flow:

As you can see, as an example, an employee applied for vacation leave. The results of the flow displays that it has retrieved this employee's vacation balance as "7" and successfully set it in the "BalanceCopy" column of the Leave Request Form list. However, when I go to the list on the SharePoint site, I see that the value is something completely different:

Note that, the value in the "BalanceCopy" column is showing "20.00", in which I cannot figure out why or where it is getting that value from. I have also tried many other tests with other leave types and the very same thing happens. As a result, some other columns I have as calculated columns that depends on the "BalanceCopy" value is not calculating the correct values, and hence, messing up other Flows that I have created to re-set the new leave balance when the request has gone through the approval process.

Can someone please offer assistance? Is anyone else experiencing the same sort of issue where the Flow is doing one thing but the SharePoint list is doing another? Any assistance is needed.

[v-bacao-msft]

Hi @Y_R ,

What is the type of BalanceCopy field? Is there any other similar Flow also has the operation of update item, please check it.

As far as I know, the Update item action does not actively change the value of the field. The value displayed in the Body of the Update item action is correct. It seems that it can be ruled out that the current Flow causes a change in the value of this field.

Best Regards,

[Y_R]

Hey @v-bacao-msft ,

Thank you for you reply.

The BalanceCopy field is simply a Number field in the SharePoint list. I have many other Flows that uses the "Update Item" action, however, none of them are updating the BalanceCopy field specifically, except this particular flow that I've attached screenshots.

I have always used the Update item action to change the value of the fields, in which they work perfectly fine. It just seems that this particular flow is not working correctly, even though I haven't done any different configurations. I have triple checked all other flows that can possibly be further affecting the BalanceCopy field and there is no other aspects.

[Y_R]

I've been playing around trying to figure things out, and it seems as though the value being registered in the SharePoint list is a somewhat cached value.... However, I also discovered that when I re-run the first run a second time, the value registers correctly. I've done multiple checks again and determine that there are no additional Flows that are affecting this particular column.

Can anyone please help me? I honestly cannot move on with my project if I don't get this working. I am trying to think of ways to maybe redo the list itself since I have evidence that the Flow is running just fine from the log of runs, and doesn't need to be re-done. But i'm not certain if I'll just be wasting my time...

Thanks in advance.

[MattWeston365]

Hi @Y_R just out of interest have you tried hard coding a value into that field just to make sure it's being picked up properly? What you're describing seems strange, and it may be worth us organising a screen share to walk through it to see if we can spot what's actually going on. Happy for you to private message me an email address for me to send a Teams invite to.

[Y_R]

Hey @MattWeston365 ,

Thank you for reaching out to help! I didn't try your suggestion before, but I gave it a shot. I can confirm that while I thought the hard coded method worked, when I continued testing with other requests, the values kept doing it's own thing and changing randomly. It is indeed a strange situation that I cannot seem to track or figure out. The run of the Flow always shows the correctly fetched value, but the Sharepoint list column that is acting on shows another.

I would gladly appreciate your help!

[Y_R · Accepted solution]

Update #1

In the interim, I had deleted my entire SharePoint list and re-created a new one with the same columns, etc from scratch. It seems as though this helped the problem as the values aren't changing randomly anymore. I can successfully say that I can move on to the other steps I need to accomplish. I guess this was some weird SharePoint bug.... Thank you all for reaching out to help!

[MattWeston365]

Hi @Y_R I'm glad you have got to the solution, apologies that I wasn't able to respond to your message in time to look at this otherwise. If you need any further help, please don't hesitate to reach out. For now, I'll mark your solution as the accepted response so that others can see how you fixed it.