Limitations of Planner connectors

[Anonymous]

It seems that the available connectors for MS Planner are pretty limited, unless I'm missing something?

What I want to achieve is to create an item in a SharePoint list each time a task is added to a planner and then to update that item each time the planner task changes.  However the connectors available only cover creation and completion and furthermore the get task details does not provide all the fields.

Do I need to build a custom connector to achieve this? 

If so, I'm not sure where to start tbh, it feels like it's moving outside the realms of the "drag n drop" Citizen Developer.

Has anyone built such custom connectors that they'd like to share?

Many thanks.

[eric-cheng]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Currently, it appears there isn't a trigger for when a task is updated or modified.  There is an idea here in case you want to upvote it.

To answer your question, a custom connector probably won't do much good here as you are trying to trigger a flow from an external system / planner.  A workaround could be to create a scheduled flow to check whether tasks has been updated but I agree this would not be ideal and I am not sure if the modified date is actually returned either.

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[Anonymous]

Thanks Eric,

I thought perhaps a custom connector would be a way of providing a new trigger and exposing the missing field, I must be misunderstanding what the custom connectors actually are.  I will certainly vote for the idea so thank you for the link.
What I have attempted is to create an extract of the planner to Excel, convert that to a list and then use a scheduled flow to look for changes, however the limited number of fields provided by Get Task Details lets this process down somewhat.

[eric-cheng]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Yes, you are correct.  A custom connector is pretty a wrapper for an API.  There are a number of benefits like security, reusability and visibility etc.  

You can create a custom connector around the planner/graph APIs and make it easier to call those APIs for other developers.   They may expose more fields.  In relations to triggers, the challenge will be trying to get Planner to call your trigger when an task is modified/updated.

I wrote a blog here on custom connectors if you want to read more.

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[EmmaHaraldsson]

I clicked the link to the idea, but came to "Access denied" couldn't vote for that idea...  

You mentioned "A workaround could be to create a scheduled flow to check whether tasks has been updated." Can you explain how to?

[takolota]

@EmmaHaraldsson @eric-cheng 

If anyone has some similar use-case where they say they are trying to connect planner & SharePoint, I highly recommend they just use this template or any similar set-up so they can get a Planner card-like experience directly in a SP list.

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Project-Tracker-SharePoint-and-Teams/td-...

Much easier than constantly running anything to sync sources.