Better way to do multiple if conditions?

[TheAbraxas]

I often find myself dealing with SharePoint lists to do compliance tasks. These often are used in a situation like this:

Each row contains an activity, a last completed date, a next due date, a frequency (weekly,monthly,quarterly,biannually,annually) , and a status (pending, complete, late, cancelled).

If the 'status' is 'complete' AND the 'next due date' is today or in the past, then I want to update 'next due date' by adding the 'frequency' value to it.

For example, take this row and assume today is October 31st, 2022.

Task Name, Last Completed, Next Due Date, Frequency, Status

"My favorite task", 09/30/2022, 10/31/2022, Monthly, Complete

The logic I want to happen is: if the task is complete AND the 'next due date' is in the past:

* Set last completed to the due date (10/31/2022)

* Change the status to 'Pending'

* Set 'next due date' to 10/31/2022 + 1 month

I can't find a way to accommodate this in a reasonable way? I feel like I would need something crazy like this:

5 different loops - one for each frequency - (weekly,monthly,quarterly,biannually,annually)

First step in the loop, create a variable where 'item.next_due_date' is the value.

Next, run 'add to time' on the variable just created by saying something like 'base time' is the 'next due date' value, the unit is month/week/year based on the loop, and the value is 1 for weekly, monthly, and annually, 3 for quarterly, and 6 for biannually.

FINALLY I run 'update item' on the item and add in the new 'next_due_date' created above.

This sucks because I end up with like 30 steps for the same process 5 times. One is a loop checking if value = monthly, another is if value = quarterly and so on. Additionally, what happens for an item due on the 31st having 'add 1 month' added to it? does it become the 30th of the following month? does that mean it will never happen on the 31st again?

So my question is this. Is there any concise way to map an array of strings to corresponding tuples of (number & value) OR a way to tie it to like 'first Monday of the month' instead of 'date + 1 month'? Lastly, is there a way to do this where you don't have to have a different loop for each condition or nested loops? The ideal situation would be:

For each row which meets the criteria, update 'next due date' to the current value + whatever the frequency value means. It's one of those simple to explain but hard to represent kind of issues?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[schwibach]

You could do a switch function and have your different cases with the sets of action in each variant of the switch.

And then do all the logic with the conditions beforehand so you'll send the data on the right track. If you put all of that logic inside a scope, the flow will be a lot less cluttered.

[Ajinder31]

Hello @TheAbraxas , You can use expressions to calculate the due date in single Action instead of multiple condition blocks. An expression will be multiple nested condition depending on number of Frequency types. For example,

if(
    equals(variables('frequency'), 'Monthly'),
               addDays(utcnow(), 30),
              if(
                   equals(variables('frequency'), 'Quarterly'),
                   addToTime(utcNow(), 3, 'Month') ,
                   utcnow()
                )
)

[TheAbraxas]

This makes a ton of sense! Thank you for this idea.

[TheAbraxas]

This makes a ton of sense! Thank you for this idea. Any good documentation with switch examples? I'm going to try this one and the expression one and see which ends up fitting best for this. Thank you again!

[PowerAppsWizard · Accepted solution]

Hi,

As stated by @Ajinder31 I would also go with expression statements which makes the flow cleaner and very fast.

My Solution would look like:

Filter expression:

@and(less(item()?['NextDueDate'], formatDateTime(utcNow(), 'yyyy-MM-dd')),equals(item()?['Status'],'Complete'))

Select - Change item expressions:

ID:

item()['ID']

Title:

 item()?['Title']

LastCompleted:

item()?['NextDueDate']

NextDueDate:

if(equals(item()?['Frequency'],'Weekly'),addToTime(utcNow(),7,'Day','yyyy-MM-dd'),if(equals(item()?['Frequency'],'Monthly'),addToTime(utcNow(),30,'Day','yyyy-MM-dd'),if(equals(item()?['Frequency'],'Monthly'),addToTime(utcNow(),1,'Month','yyyy-MM-dd'),if(equals(item()?['Frequency'],'Quarterly'),addToTime(utcNow(),3,'Month','yyyy-MM-dd'),if(equals(item()?['Frequency'],'Biannually'),addToTime(utcNow(),6,'Month','yyyy-MM-dd'),if(equals(item()?['Frequency'],'Annually'),addToTime(utcNow(),1,'Year','yyyy-MM-dd')))))))

Status:

Pending

[TheAbraxas]

This is awesome, thank you for the detail!!