Combine emails for Checkbox Forms

[Anonymous]

Good evening,

I would like to ask you for advice on managing a form checkbox with MS Flow. Basically I would like to combine the emails associated with two variables into a single email. Instead it forwards me two separate emails.

Thanks

[Jronash]

From your screenshot, I don't see a reason why you would receive two emails unless you get a form response that matches both of your conditions (assuming your other condition also sends an email).

You should check the run history for one of the form responses that triggered multiple emails.  Check to see if 

1. more than one flow was triggered
2. within each flow, was more than one 'send email' action processed?

[Anonymous]

In practice, I have noticed that if I enter in CC: the shared email e.g. operazioni@impresa.net and in A: the two reference addresses. I get two emails with the individual contacts as a result. Like this:

- Email 1: To: destination address CC: operazioni@impresa.net
- Email 2: To: destination address (2) CC: operazioni@impresa.net

Instead I should get the following result:

- Email 1: To: destination address; destination address (2) CC: operazioni@impresa.net

Could I integrate functions?

Thank you

[Anonymous]

hi can help me? thx

[Jronash]

I don't have enough information to know why more than one email is being sent.  Have you looked through your run history yet?  If you look at the history of a previous run, it should be relatively easy to see if/when multiple emails were sent.

[Anonymous]

Good evening,

thank you for the support, in practice through the CheckBOX of the regions we have prepared different email contacts. The problem arises when we select multiple regions. I don't want the FLOW to send multiple emails with different contacts. But join them in a single email. Example. If I select the following Regions: LAZIO, LOMBARDIA etc. it is necessary that I send the FORM data a single email. 

I would like to avoid creating an email thread for each combination. At the moment, calculating the possible selections of the form. We are about 300 combinations. I would like to avoid posting all of them in the flow.

thank you

[Jronash]

Sounds like your REGIONE data is coming from a checkbox on your form, which would mean that it would be an array, right?  It can contain multiple regions?

There are a number of different ways to join an array, but first I'd need to understand how your Regions are matched with the Email addresses where the message should be sent.  Do the email address also come from your form, or are they stored somewhere else in your system?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

yes they are included on each region, included in the outlook module of flow.
How do I make an array with the REGIONS? it would be perfect because if you select several regions I would have one email with the contacts of REGION1, REGION2 example. Thanks for your support.

[Jronash]

Is it possible for you to show me the part of the flow that gets the email address for a region?

[Anonymous]

sure, here's the flow I do for emails. The array should as a rule understand that you select two REGIONS and send one email, with the contacts of the regionals. Basically of 10 contacts only 2 per region change. Something simple but at the same time complicated 😞

[Jronash]

So it looks like you are setting your email addresses by using a lot of conditional statements (IF the region is x, send the email to y).

For what you want to do, there will not be a simple way to make this work.  What you need is a sort of dictionary that contains all the regions and the email addresses associated with them.  Think of it as a spreadsheet that has one column for regions and another column for email addresses.  You could build this in a SharePoint list, an Excel spreadsheet, or even in a Compose action if you are familiar with JSON.

After you have your dictionary, you can loop through your regions - for each region, filter your dictionary to find the row related to that region, and then take the email address from the same row and put it in a different array.

After the loop is completed, you have an array of email addresses.  You can use that to send one email out to every email address in the array.

This is a intermediate-level process that we're talking about, so depending on your level of experience, what I've said may not make much sense.  If you're interested in pursuing this, let me know how you would like to build your dictionary and we can take it step by step from there.

[Anonymous]

Good evening Jronash,

sure would be very cool, the problem that the JSON I am not very experienced. For the email data we can use sharepoint. Thanks, we will update as soon as possible. Regards

[Jronash · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous, were you able to create a spreadsheet or SharePoint list with all of the regions and their related email addresses?

[Anonymous]

hi@Jronash ,

I have created the sharepoint with contacts, one information the variables with multiple emails in a cell must be divided by the symbol (,)? thanks

[Anonymous]

hi@Jronash ,

do you need more information?

thx 🙂

[Anonymous]

Hi @Jronash , you can help me pls?

[Jronash · Accepted solution]

It's been a busy week, @Anonymous.

Ok, I think we can work with the list you've created.  Assuming I understand what you want to do, here's how you could build the flow.

First, in your list, don't separate the email addresses with commas.  Instead, put a semicolon on the end of each address.  For instance: test1@gmail.com; test2@gmail.com; test3@gmail.com; etc.

Start by initiating an array variable to help you keep track of all the email addresses you will be sending to:

  

After that, create an Apply to each loop, and have it loop over the REGIONE checkbox array from your form.  (This looks a little different in my flow because I don't have that form field.)

Put your REGIONE checkbox where you see the purple Output in my flow.

Next, do a Get Items SharePoint action to get the items from the Regions list you created.  Use the filter query so that it will only return items where the Title matches the current item.  You can reference the current item by using this expression:

item()

If you are using the old Get Items action, the Filter Query will look a little bit different:

Next, create another Apply to each loop, this time coming from your Get Items Action.

Inside that loop, use an 'Append to array variable' action to add all of the email fields to your variable.

Now that you have all of the relevant email addresses in a single array, you need to flatten that array into a string that you can use in your email action.  You can do this by using the join() expression in a Compose action.

I included the whole flow in the screenshot so you can see that my 'Email array to string' Compose action is after the Apply to each loop, not inside of it.

In your Compose action, use the following expression to convert your email array to a string:

join(variables('Emails'),' ')

Then you can use the output from that Compose action in the To field of your Send an Email action.

[Anonymous]

Good evening @Jronash,

I have tested the script and it is perfect, but I have a problem maybe I am wrong. Basically the Flow hangs because of this error:

I assume that the variable fails to initialise emails. I have followed all the steps and will try to post the stream.

DB_Sharepoint:

FLOW:

initialize variable:

Compose + Email:

Form

One thing I have noticed is to initialise the variables: [A] & [CC] with predefined contacts avoiding repeating them in the sharepoint. The dynamic variables are [Regional Manager] & [Chief Territorial Manager].

For everything I just have to thank you, I hope that the next module I will be autonomous based on these teachings.

[Jronash]

Hi @Anonymous.

I see two problems so far.

First, you need to go back through your SharePoint list and put a semicolon after every email address.  Even if there is just one email address in a column, it needs to have a semicolon after it.

Side-note:  I'm also confused why you have two list items in your SharePoint list that are both for Umbria.  There should only be one list item for each region, right?  

The second issue:  You have your Apply to each loop set to loop over your Email variable, but this is incorrect.  It needs to loop over the REGIONE checkbox from your Microsoft form.

[Anonymous]

thank you I have reclaimed the sharepoint with unique IDs separated by the symbol [;]. While for the flow issue I have inserted the change. But it keeps giving this error:

maybe it can't identify the region?

thx for support.