Planner Tasks OrderHint value not respecting order within Bucket

[philCryo]

Hi there,

I have my Planner Tasks in a certain order in a Bucket:

If I do a List Tasks action and grab the JSON body of the List Tasks output via a Compose flow block:

...when sorting those Tasks by the Planner Order Hint values, as expected, the Tasks end up ordered in a way that matches what I see in Microsoft Planner:

Title	OrderHint - Initial
Test5	8586225556019748676PQ
Test4	8586225556030217433Pl
Test3	8586225556040992244P6
Test2	8586225556087825095PU
Test1	8586225556103966463P}

However, if I now manually-by-hand arrange those same Planner Tasks in the same Planner Bucket -- say ordered by Task Title ascending:

...and then use the same List Tasks -> Compose (ListTasks.output.body) flow, the OrderHint values for those same Tasks "Test1" through "Test 5" DO NOT CHANGE even though the Tasks themselves have been re-ordered in Planner. According to this docs.Microsoft.com how-to article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/planner-order-hint-format?view=graph-rest-1.0 -- the Order Hints should have changed so that when sorted that raw JSON Task data by Order Hint ascending, the Tasks would then match what I see in Planner.

HELP????

[edgonzales]

@philCryo 

Hi there.  So, the orderhint property looks like fun.  What I suspect is happening is that the orderhints are really only changed if you manually affect the sort (creating a custom sort).  If you sort using name or some other canned property, the planner UI is probably ignoring the orderhint and using that property instead.

I did find an article that you may find useful, along with the official documentation.

Either way, keep us posted.  I'm curious to see if my theory is correct.

Thanks,

-Ed-

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[philCryo]

@edgonzalesI manually re-arranged the Tasks within the Bucket in the Planner -- just like in the the official documentation to which you linked -- which describes "placing" an item before another item which would then "create" order hints.

But that's not happening here.  Manual re-arrangement of Tasks within the Bucket did not change the order hints.

HELP???

[philCryo]

Anybody?  Is this a bug in either Power Automate's retrieval of Planner tasks -- or a bug in Planner itself?

[philCryo]

BUMP

FYI I edited the original post to hopefully clarify a few things.  I've also cross-posted this to the Microsoft Planner Tech Community as well: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/planner/potential-bug-in-microsoft-planner-s-task-order-hint/...

[philCryo · Accepted solution]

Here's what I found via my cross-post to the Microsoft Tech Community's Planner board:

A Microsoft Planner Task's OrderHint is just for sorting if all of a Planner's Tasks were clumped together into a simple list.  It is not for sorting to make a list like when looking at Microsoft Planner's Web UI.

Within Power Automate, if I wanted to sort a list of Planner Tasks that are within a single Planner Bucket in the order shown in the Microsoft Planner's Web UI, I would need to have the ability to retrieve each Planner Task's "BucketTaskBoardTaskFormat": https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/plannerbuckettaskboardtaskformat?view=graph-res...

MS Graph offers the ability to get that "BucketTaskBoardTaskFormat" object....but unless I'm mistaken, Power Automate doesn't appear to have an accessor method that will retrieve that object: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/planner/

UGH!!!!!!!!!

(thanks to Anubhav Singh for figuring out what was missing!!! https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/156133 )

[philCryo]

Please vote for this feature-add: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Ideas/Access-Microsoft-Planner-Task-s-BucketTaskB...