Recurrence only on weekdays

[Scott_Mikus]

I would like to create a flow that allows me to send emails to my team that are already pre-written. They will be the same 5 or 6 emails sent every day at the same times each day but I only want to send them on the weekdays and not the weekends. I have only been able to find the recurrence item to allow for timing of actions in the flow tool. But this does not allow for specific days to be excluded when creating Flows. I am looking for a way to time an email to be sent at say 8:00 AM an email to be sent at 11:00 AM an email to be sent at 2:00 PM and an email to be sent at 5:00 PM repeating daily Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and Friday then excluding Saturday and Sunday then starting up again Monday and so on. I am unable to find any way to do this thus far. I have found other tools that can do this of which I won’t name names as I am a Microsoft employee and would very much like to use our own products above any of our competitors. But I am unable to find the simplest of triggers in the Flow framework. I would think a feature like days and time or a recurring event would be one of the first things that would be included in an automation framework. If someone could please point me in the right direction I would really appreciate it! Thank you in advance for you time and effort.

[v-monli-msft]

Hi Scott,

It is true that Flow does not have such recurrence to allow you specify the days of the week or the date and time. It would be much more convenient for the user if the recurrence trigger could be more flexible. 

As you know, Flow is still a preview product and you could always submit your feedback to Microsoft to help improve Flow. Here is the feedback forum link:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Flow-Ideas/idb-p/FlowIdeas 

Best regards,

Mona Li

[Anonymous]

The approach I'm looking into is using a reocurreing calendar appointment to trigger a flow.  Havn't figured it out yet though maybe this approach will "light the spark" for someone who knows the fundamentals of flow more than I do.

[TravisB · Accepted solution]

 

Hi @Anonymous, @Scott_Mikus,

I was able to get the desired behavior working in the above flow.

Instead of having a flow only triggering on weekdays, I trigger the flow every day and check that it's a weekday before doing any work.

The part that's doing the work is the advanced query @contains('12345', string(dayOfWeek(addHours(utcNow(), -8))))

To break it down, we first find the current time when the flow is triggered in UTC time with utcNow().

Then I convert that to my local timezone (PST) by subtracting 8 hours with addHours(utcNow(), -8)

We can then get the day of the week with dayOfWeek(addHours(utcNow(), -8)) which returns a number representing the day of week (0 = sunday, 1 = monday...)

We can then compare the day of the week with the weekdays by comparing the string (text) value of the day of the week with the weekday values (1-5).

I wasn't super happy with having to convert to a string. I was hoping to do an array comparison with @contains([1, 2, 3, 4, 5], dayOfWeek(addHours(utcNow(), -8))). According to the documentation that should be possible, but I wasn't able to get that to save. There's probably something I missed there, but the above solution will definitely work.

I hope that helps with your flows!

There's really a whole lot that's opened up through advanced queries, but the debugging experience can be pretty difficult. We're always looking for ways to expose these advanced control capabilities in the designer to save users from having to dig into the query language to get what they want done.

But in the meantime, anyone looking to learn more about advanced queries can find more information here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-workflow-definition-language

Best,
Travis

[kaustubhgadre]

You can also use the switch-case here. 

1. Recurrence - Whatever time you need to send out the notification. 
2. Add a switch case for the expression dayOfWeek
   1. Case equal 0,6 - then do nothing.
   2. Default - Perform the action. e.g. Post message to teams. 

[Radoslavov]

You can select Run the flow every week and then use Preview feature On these days and select the days of the week that you want the flow to run on.

If that help, please mark it as Usefull/Answer 

[samlab]

All,

It seems like this has now been solved within Microsoft Flow to allow only certain days to be selected through the Frequency: Week.

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

Hi @TravisB 

I try to set up the same condition,

could you explain in detail what you fill(ed) in the 3 entry fields/boxes?

First one is empty   > i filled {"source":"la-draft-clipboard","value":[{"tokenKey":"02594F73-54D8-4517-B17F-8D3EF7FB19F4","type":"literal","tokenExpression":"string(dayOfWeek(addHours(utcNow(),-8)))"}]}

Second is drop down, e.g. contains  > i filled contains

third one is empty   > i filled 12345

Regards,

Rutger

[Anonymous]

Is Flow--er sorry, Power Automate, an actual big-boy product or someone's school project? The simple stock clock app on my phone has the ability for me to make an alarm only sound on certain days of the week. Don't make people come up with hacky solutions to make up for your lack of features, M$.

[holmesmatthew]