Weekly birthday notification

[tdwils]

Hi all,

I have a weird Flow that I need to rebuild.

I need a Flow that runs every Monday at 8am, checks a SharePoint list that includes employee birthdays, and sees if any of those birthdays falls within the upcoming week.  Then, it sends an email to a few specific people as a "heads up."  This is NOT a birthday email to the person, it's a notification of upcoming birthdays to administration.  Hopefully that makes sense.  All I have been able to find anything on is automated birthday messages and I'm ready to pull my hair out.  Here is what I have so far (that probably doesn't make any sense).

Basically my thought process was create variables for beginning of the week and end of the week (start/end dates), create an html table, check the birthdays, if yes - send email with table.  I just cannot figure this one out and I feel like maybe I am just way overthinking it.

It gets tripped up when it gets to the conditional and says: The template language function 'greaterOrEquals' expects two parameter of matching types. The function was invoked with values of type 'Null' and 'String' that do not match.'.  So there's something it doesn't like.  It also prompts me to create an OData filter with the Get Items command but I don't even know how to start telling it what I want.  Any advice or help is much appreciated!

[Expiscornovus]

Hi @tdwils,

Just to double check.

What are you storing in the Birthdate field? If it is somebody's birthday today would that be 08-12. Or are you including the current year or the birth year in the value of that field?

Btw, you could also add the birthdate filtering in the OData filter query of the Get Items instead of that condition action.

[Expiscornovus]

Hi @tdwils,

Btw, I just had another look at your whole flow. I think with adding a select and a create html table action you could reduce the number of actions in your current setup.

Below is that other approach.

The select is used to only retrieve to fields you want and the create html table will format the rows as table with columns and rows. This is like you are currently doing with the append to string variable actions. The main difference is that this will avoid putting stuff in an apply to each loop.

The Filter query is still the same as in my previous reply. Only switched the Filter Query field to advanced mode 😄

(Birthdate ge '@{addDays(utcNow(), -1)}') and (Birthdate le '@{addDays(utcNow(),5)}')

[tdwils]

Thanks so much for your thoughts!  To answer your initial question, it's stored in the SharePoint list as a date field (including the year).  After wrestling with this for several hours yesterday, I anticipate that that's part of my problem.

I just got to my desk, so I will try some of your suggestions out and let you know how it goes! 🙂

[tdwils]

Okay, so everything runs fine, but my "Get Items" isn't returning anything (presumably because 1/1/1968 doesn't fall within this week!

So, how would I best tell the Flow to ignore the year?  In scouring the internet I have found something like this where the person sets a condition.  I just don't know where I would put it in my flow...  Would something like this work?

[Expiscornovus]

Hi @tdwils,

In that case I would replace the birthyear by the current year for the Birthdate field. You could do that by removing the OData filter query from the Get items and add a Filter Array action directly after the Get Items.

Below is an example of an expression which you can use in the filter array.

So, basically all the filtering will be done in the Filter Array action instead.

In the concatenate function I am determining the format of the Birthdate. So, this year would be 2021-MM-dd. I am getting that year by using a utcNow('yyyy'). Next year would be 2022-MM-dd. This way you can compare it with the utcNow.

@and(greaterOrEquals(formatdateTime(item()?['Birthdate'], concat(utcNow('yyyy'), 'MM-dd')), addDays(utcNow(), -1)), lessOrEquals(formatdateTime(item()?['Birthdate'], concat(utcNow('yyyy'), 'MM-dd')), addDays(utcNow(), 5)))

[tdwils]

@Expiscornovus,

A few hiccups, for some reason when I create the "Select" step, it puts everything inside an "Apply Each" condition.  How do I get it to not do that?  Or is it fine?  It doesn't look like your flow has it.  I'd imagine doing this would send a separate email for each person who has a birthday?  I tried pulling the email out but then I can't add the table to it.

I tried running it anyway and it failed at the "Filter Array" step:

The execution of template action 'Filter_array' failed: The evaluation of 'query' action 'where' expression '@and(greaterOrEquals(formatdateTime(item()?['Birthdate'], concat(utcNow('yyyy'), 'MM-dd')), addDays(utcNow(), -1)), lessOrEquals(formatdateTime(item()?['Birthdate'], concat(utcNow('yyyy'), 'MM-dd')), addDays(utcNow(), 5)))' failed: 'The template language function 'formatdateTime' expects its first parameter to be of type string. The provided value is of type 'Null'. Please see https://aka.ms/logicexpressions#formatdatetime for usage details.'.

I do have one line in the table that has NO birthday in it, so it's failing because it's getting a null value (I think...).  Would I need to add another chunk to the function in the "Filter Array"?  So that way it can account for fields with no value?  Sorry for all the weirdness!  I think it's close though!

[Expiscornovus]

Hi @tdwils,

Yes, you should avoid the apply to each.

In your Select action populate the From field first with the Body of the Filter Array before you select the Name and Birthdate fields. This will prevent it from going into a loop.

And you are right. The current filters can fail on null values. Either make sure the data source doesn't have null values or we to change the filters and make them a bit more complicated 😁

[tdwils]

@Expiscornovus 

Yeah... unfortunately I think it needs to be more complicated because the person who is blank specifically does *NOT* want to receive birthday mail.  So, it's blank.  And I wouldn't want to add a "fake" value because if that person populates on the email they might not know.

[Expiscornovus]

Hi @tdwils,

In that case we can check for empty.

equals(empty(item()?['Birthdate']), false)

You can add that with another and to the whole filter of the Filter array, which would be:

@and(equals(empty(item()?['Birthdate']), false), and(greaterOrEquals(formatdateTime(item()?['Birthdate'], concat(utcNow('yyyy'), 'MM-dd')), addDays(utcNow(), -1)), lessOrEquals(formatdateTime(item()?['Birthdate'], concat(utcNow('yyyy'), 'MM-dd')), addDays(utcNow(), 5))))

[tdwils]

Additionally, it seems that even if I bill in the "Body" section first, it automatically pulls me into an "apply to each" loop.  I can even set the body, type in the headers, and then very lastly add the dynamic content.  But as soon as I click the first field it pulls it into the loop.

[Expiscornovus]

Hi @tdwils,

Sorry, for me it didn't go into a loop. Sometimes avoiding a loop can be a bit of a struggle 😂

A workaround could be to refer to the correct fields by using Expressions instead of selecting the fields in the Dynamic content section. That should definitely not put it into a loop. Can you try that?

Go to map section. And select the Expression tab instead of the Dynamic Content tab. Type item()?['Internalfieldname']

If you don't know the internalname of your fields just hover over the field in the current setup. The tooltip should show the name (ignore the items apply to each part, we don't want that).

 

[tdwils]

IT WORKS!!!  It just returned exactly what I was hoping for.  I cannot thank you enough for this.  I had been hacking at this thing for several hours.  I so appreciate your patience and assistance.  Marking as solved. 🙂

[tdwils]

@Expiscornovus- sorry to bring this back up again, but monday (and several other times but this is the first time it's been caught), this flow did not perform as intended.

the filter array is as you noted above:

@and(equals(empty(item()?['oc9t']), false), and(greaterOrEquals(formatdateTime(item()?['oc9t'], concat(utcNow('yyyy'), 'MM-dd')), addDays(utcNow(), -1)), lessOrEquals(formatdateTime(item()?['oc9t'], concat(utcNow('yyyy'), 'MM-dd')), addDays(utcNow(), 5))))

so, if monday was the 21st, it should be pulling birthdays from 2/20-2/26.  the flow *did not* pull in the sunday birthday (2/20) yesterday.

i've been changing/testing the number of days to add, and -2 (which in my mind would include last sunday), does not pull the 20th, but +5 pulls the upcoming sunday (as I expected it would).  -3 *does* pull last sunday.  so, i'm thinking it may be a time issue?  it's about 2:15pm right now...

does this maybe have something to do with how utc now calculates?  it worked and produced the results i wanted last time, so i am struggling to pick out why it's not pulling sunday birthdays in.  here's my frequency settings just as some additional information:

any ideas as to why it's not behaving?  or suggestions on how to improve the timing so that it's pulling dates correctly?  thank you!!

[tdwils]

Bumping this in the off chance someone else has any ideas...

[Expiscornovus]

Hi @tdwils,

Just to double check, can you show me what the settings are of your oc9t date and time column?

I will have a look at the original Filter Array query, see if I can reproduce your issue.

[tdwils]

@Expiscornovus- sure thing:

I did tinker a bit with this yesterday and I *think* I may have fixed it...  I didn't mess with when it starts running, but I did change the addDays(utcNow(), -1) to addDays(utcNow(), -2).  Not sure if that did anything, but it did pull the Sunday birthday yesterday when I tested.

@and(equals(empty(item()?['oc9t']), false), and(greaterOrEquals(formatdateTime(item()?['oc9t'], concat(utcNow('yyyy'), 'MM-dd')), addDays(utcNow(), -2)), lessOrEquals(formatdateTime(item()?['oc9t'], concat(utcNow('yyyy'), 'MM-dd')), addDays(utcNow(), 5))))

Thanks!