Create an Event (Meeting) based on Availabilty of attendees & conference room

[Asuncion]

Hello, I'm pretty new to Power Automate, wondering if anyone else has come across this issue or can assist with a solution. Appreciate any help, thank 

Currently, a document is loaded onto SharePoint triggering an email notification, letting know team involved this needs to be reviewed and discussed further. Then I would like to then have an action that follows.. that finds meeting times then based on the availability automatically creates an event (meeting) for all parties. 

Here's what I currently have setup:

The Setup

Here's the error I receive when I do a test run:

The Error

[Asuncion]

Full error shows: 

{
"status": 400,
"message": "String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.\r\nclientRequestId: 802fa315-1601-4669-876c-99cbac952e89",
"error": {
"message": "String was not recognized as a valid DateTime."
},
"source": "office365-eus.azconn-eus-01.p.azurewebsites.net"
}

[DeepakS]

Hi @Asuncion  looking at your error it seems like apply to each function is receiving incorrect date formate or empty.

Could you please share and check what date formate are you passing in Start time and End time fields in "Find Meeting Times".

here is my sample flow that works fine I used -addHours(utcNow(),24,'MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm') something like this.

If this does not fix your issue share the Find Meeting Times output.

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[Asuncion]

Hello @DeepakS,

Thanks for your help. I'm using the following expressions for my Start and End time. I was trying to use an expression that I thought would help the flow only look for availability between 8am to 5pm (work hours). Any suggestions?

Start Time: 

-addHours(startOfDay(formatDateTime(convertTimeZone(utcnow(), 'UTC', 'Pacific Standard Time')), 'hh:mm'), 8 )

End Time:

-addHours(startOfDay(formatDateTime(convertTimeZone(utcnow(), 'UTC', 'Pacific Standard Time')), 'hh:mm'), 17)

[DeepakS]

Hi @Asuncion 

I just tried with your expression and still works. Could you please post what you are getting in Start Time and End Time after a run at Find Meeting Time step.

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[Asuncion]

@DeepakShere is what I get from running the Find Meeting Step;

[DeepakS · Accepted solution]

@Asuncion 

 when you are creating event, try using following expression to get the start and end DateTime:
items('Apply_to_each')?['meetingTimeSlot']['start']['dateTime']
items('Apply_to_each')?['meetingTimeSlot']['end']['dateTime']
change loop object as per your flow (sorry if you are already doing like this).

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[Asuncion]

@DeepakStruly appreciate your help with this! The great news is that applying those expressions to my Create Event action got the flow to run successfully, however the 1 test run created 6 meetings on the Outlook calendar and Im not sure why?  

Looks like a 4pm meeting for each conference room (3) and a 4:30pm for each conference room (3). 

Here are the field details from Create Event:

[DeepakS]

Hi @Asuncion  The reason behind this you might be getting more than one available time. Not sure about your requirements, but you can create a meeting for the first occurrence of available time and discard others.

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[Asuncion]

@DeepakS is there a particular expression or type of dynamic content I have to apply in order to create the meeting with the first occurrence found from Find Meeting then disregard the rest?

[DeepakS]

Hi @Asuncion 

Set Max Candidates Properties to 1 on Find Meeting times action. i would also recommend you to read about other  as well, you may find them use full in your scenario :

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/office365/#find-meeting-times-(v2)

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[paulohigor]

EDIT: I could solve the problem below after realizing that I was not using the correct format to the ending time of the meeting 🙂 couldn't believe how simple was that. Now, all my colleagues will be spending circa 30-50min less to fisinish a weekly task.

Thanks anyway 🙂

Hi, everyone!
@Asuncion @DeepakS 

Power automate is also pretty new for me. I'm struggling at automate the sending Microsoft Teams invitations of pre scheduled meetings. It only gets posible when I use past dates or for the same day, and seems to me that the date/time format is correct - but my goal is to send these invitations for future meetings on the next week, based on a Excel file.

I don't have more details from Power Automate about the reason that caused this fail. It seems to me that I couldn't, until now, create this automation for future meetings - using past dates or even today as reference, everything runs ok.

Could someone help me understand what is going on and what could I do to fix it? Thank you!

[LLMaeder]

 Hey everyone! @Asuncion @DeepakS @paulohigor 

i have a smiliar problem. I built a flow which automatically searches for free meeting dates in the calendars of both atendees and afterwards creates a meeting in a free time slot. The flow works but it always sets a meeting in already booked times. My steps are "Find meeting time" -> "Apply to each (Suggestionsformeetingtimes)" -> "Create a meeting". Do you have any idea what might be the problem? Thank you very much!

[paulohigor]

Hey, @LLMaeder !

1. I solved what I needed and it may help you as well.

2. I'm not sure if I understood what happened to you - and I'm not an expert in Power Automate. At the same time, I'm available to talk and try to solve this problem with you - maybe with a videocall in teams? My corporative e-mail is <paulo.moreira@faleck.com.br>.

I think that improving the first trigger may be the answer we're looking for!

[LLMaeder]

Hey @paulohigor, thank you very much for your answer! Could you take a look at this post i created: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Power-Automate/Create-a-meeting-after-searching-for-free...

Maybe its easier for you to understand my problem now 🙂