Get url of SharePoint site that a Form is embedded in

[IRieger]

Hi folks,

I've built a Flow for a Forms contact form on a SharePoint site that creates a new Planner task when someone submits an inquiry, which works just fine. But as we have a separate page for different departments that each have their own Planner board, I would like to reuse my existing Form and expand the Flow to pick the Planner board depending on the SharePoint site that the Form was submitted from, rather than making a copy of the same Form and Flow for each department (which would also be a pain for any future changes).

My current solution is a dropdown to select the department manually, but that's kind of redundant considering you're already on the SharePoint page of said department. I thought to get the url of the site that the Form is embedded in, and branch the Flow to set the Planner board and responsible person accordingly.

Is this possible at all, and if so, what's the most elegant way to solve this? If not, is there a workaround?

[v-lin-msft]

Hello @IRieger,

Although each team will have a separate SharePoint creation, the planner in the team exists separately from the SharePoint site, and a team may be have multiple planner boards, so you cannot create planner board tasks based on the SharePoint site in the form.

Could you show me the screenshot and details of your flow configuration, please? So that I can see what your current workaround looks like, and we can evaluate the possibility of your requirements implementation.

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _ Lin Tu

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[IRieger]

Hi @v-lin-msft, thank you for your reply!

Here's my current Flow - I apologize for the mess of German and English, I started with a template and added to it. Hope it's legible enough anyway. I'm also not exactly a developer, I understand a few things but I'm still learning the ropes of Flow.

Here I'm initializing a string variable to use for the task details later, so I won't have to update those in six different branches.

Between the previous step and this one is the option for users to receive a confirmation email, I left that out because I don't think it's relevant here? Then the Flow branches out - "Bereich" is a dropdown menu in the Form that lets them choose the department, and depending on that choice it will pick the corresponding Planner board (there is exactly one per team in our case) and assign a task to the person responsible. It will also save the ID of that newly created task in the taskID variable.

This is where ideally I'd like to skip the dropdown and move the department picking to the backend, to save the user a few clicks and make it a little less clunky. And my hope was to do that through the url of the site the Form is accessed from, since it's embedded on each department's SharePoint page. In case it makes a difference: they're all part of the same overall SharePoint site, only separate pages within that.

And finally we're updating the task details to actually contain the Form entries. Afterwards it just sends me a success or failure email, that was a part of the original template that I didn't mess with.

The Flow works as it is, I just think it's a little awkward for users to have to navigate to a department page and then pick the department again in the contact form.

Thanks for your time!

[v-lin-msft]

Hello @IRieger,

You can try to create a method based on the plan name to create a task, first create a Form column the plan name, then when a new item is created, trigger the flow, get all the Plans name and id, and then find a the plan name corresponding to the create item, and then fill in the plan id in the "create task" action.

Please take a try with the following workaround:

The result of flow run:

I hope it will help you, and you have any problem, please contact us.

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _ Lin Tu

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[IRieger]

Hi @v-lin-msft, and thank you very much for the tutorial.

I think I understand the approach you're suggesting, and it would certainly get rid of the clunky branches I set up there - but I don't think it's really what I'm looking for. It would still require the user to pick which team they're contacting, only with the actual internal name of the Plan this time, right? I could probably change the dropdown to accomodate that, but our internal names differ a little from the ones we're using on the SharePoint site, so it might get confusing for users in addition to being an extra step I'm trying to eliminate. Until management decides on more consistent naming, I'm not sure this will make my contact form more user friendly.

Your suggestion, if I understand it correctly, would be neat for internal users who know the Plans we're working with, but this is more of an outward facing application (for colleagues outside of our department) that I would like to make as smooth a user experience as possible.

But again, thank you for providing a possible workaround, I really appreciate it!

[IRieger]

Addition: I just realized I don't necessarily need to read the url of the SharePoint page in question. I'm tagging each page with its department in the Pages library for organizational purposes. Will now look if it's possible to get that worked into my Flow, since I imagine it'd be a little more flexible than a fixed url!

So really at this point the thing I'm trying to find out is if it's possible to access the data of a SharePoint page through a Form embedded within it, without additional user input. If that's fundamentally impossible, I'll have to live with that or find another way.

[v-lin-msft]

Hello @IRieger,

I think the requirement you want to implement is that external users can get the plan name specified in it by typing team name in MS Form. It is not feasible to add the task directly through this way, because the Connector MS Teams does not provide APIs the plan included in the separate team.

However, assuming that each of your separate teams contains one or more plan boards, which are not updated frequently, you can add the team plan to your MS Form options when an external user enters the team name in the MS form. At the time, you can choose the team to which he belongs, just like the screenshot below.

You need to create a SharePoint list, which stores the team name and plan name. When you create the team task to which the external user belongs, you will find the corresponding plan name. Then the flow will get the Plan ID of the corresponding plan name in the plan list. Plan id add task. About adding the next step by looking up the corresponding plan name, you can refer to my last reply.

In this case, the user does not have to fill in the plan name, only need to know the team name, but there is only one designated plan board in each team.

Of course, this is based on the fact that your team is limited and not updated frequently. If your team and plan name change, you need to make changes to the TeamList data in SharePoint. I think the only inconvenience is that these are manual. Operational.

I hope this method can help you.

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _ Lin Tu

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[IRieger]

Hi @v-lin-msft and thank you again for your advice.

While it's still not 100% what I was looking for in terms of reducing redundant steps for external users, I did implement your suggestion with a SharePoint list and filtered array now instead of juggling 6 Flow branches. It took me a while to get everything to work, but I also saved each respective inbox bucket and responsible team member in the list so my Flow is much cleaner now.

I suppose a little dropdown menu is a small enough inconvenience to accept for users if it means we won't have to keep up 6 different Forms, so I'll keep it as it is for now.

Thank you again!

This is how I solved it for now: