Planner Label and Checklist Items

[cwade0723]

Greetings

I am looking to create a flow where when an existing Planner Task changes labels, additional checklist items are added for that new label.

Example, when the task is initially created by a different flow, there are default checklist items created. Let's say up to 4. What we want is when the engineer has completed those checklist items, they manually change the label to the next phase and when that occurs, 4 additional checklist items are added to the task for that phase. That would continue until all phases are done and up to 20 checklist items which is the max

One additional thing if it is possible, each time the label changes, we would like the due date to change based on an SLA

Note. We use the task cards as projects and within the card are the project checklist items

[Jronash]

Interesting idea!  How far have you gotten in building it?

[cwade0723]

The only thing I have been able to think of is a flow that scans nightly for Label changes and then applies the appropriate checklist items to that task based on the label assignment. Problem with this is it's not real time nor is there a way that I have found that identifies when the label was changed. 

[Jronash]

Yeah, it doesn't look like the Planner trigger options would work well with trying to do something based on a label change.

You can trigger on task completion... would it be an option to have your user mark the task as complete instead of changing the label?  Then your flow could get the label on the completed task and create a new task in the next label with the checkboxes you need?

[cwade0723]

Hi

This makes sense to do but it would mean that we would have to change the entire process. Right now, we are using the planner task as a project and the checklist items as milestones that bundle tasks. We have different buckets based on the different project types

Is there any other creative ways to apply this trigger?

[Jronash]

It would be possible if Planner had a "When a task is modified" trigger, but it doesn't have anything like that.  There are other 'creative' possibilities, but I think you'll find that they would be much more work to implement and would be much more prone to bugs and glitches.

One creative option would be to run a flow every x  minutes, to see if any task has changed.  But in order to do that, you'd need to create a list of all your tasks and their important features somewhere else (like SharePoint) so you can check how the task has changed, and you'd have to make sure the list stays in sync with your tasks.  There are lots of possible breakage points in this plan.

Another option would be to create a flow with an HTTP trigger, and add a link to each new task that people can click when they're ready for their task to move to the next label.  Clicking the link would trigger the flow, which would make the necessary changes.  This would require a premium license and there would still be some big potential breakage points - if a user deletes or modifies the link in the task, there would be no way for them to progress to the next step.  Also, clicking the link would open a web browser window, which would be awkward and you'd have to decide what to do with that.

Personally, I think it would be worth it to consider tweaking your process rather than dumping a ton of time into solutions that aren't ideal.  But maybe someone else has a better creative idea that I haven't thought of.