Duplicate SharePoint items created by Flow -- 10 items for every 1 expected

[Anonymous]

I'm having a very bizarre issue. Not sure whether it's a Flow or a SharePoint thing. I'm creating SP list items from rows in an Excel spreadsheet. There were 10 rows in the Excel file. My Flow ran successfully and the outputs indicate that it created 10 items in SharePoint. All good.  Except that SharePoint somehow actually got 10 items created for every 1 row in Excel! How would it duplicate itself exactly 10 times for each item? And why doesn't the run history of the Flow indicate this? It seems perfectly fine. If Flow did not create all the duplicates, how did they come to be? No additional runs. No re-submitted spreadsheets. Just 10 times more entries in SP than expected.

[rsaikrishna]

@Anonymous 

Can you clear off the list and re-run the flow to see if you are observing the same.

If you observe the same, can you share your flow screen shot?

Did you check if you have two nested Apply to each conditions while creating list items? Just guessing.

Regards

Krishna Rachakonda

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[Anonymous]

@rsaikrishna  So I can't re-run the exact spreadsheet because it might email business people dozens of dupe approval tasks (again). I did run a test using a modified copy of the exact file that my user submitted this morning. It worked fine. No duplicates! I do have 2 nested  apply-to-each actions, which was to handle some date conversion issues. But tests before and after this one user's spreadsheet all worked fine. And the outputs of her Flow run indicate that 10 items were created in SharePoint:

[Anonymous]

[rsaikrishna]

@Anonymous 

Is "ApplyEach Date" action inside another Apply to each? 

Is it possible to share entire flow screen shot?

I see that either some problem in the logic or the flow ran multiple times. 

Regards

Krishna Rachakonda

If this reply helped you to solve the issue, please mark the post as Accepted Solution. Marking this post as Accepted Solution, will help many other users to use this post to solve same or similar issue without re-posting the issue in the group. Saves a lot of time for everyone.

[Anonymous]

Yes - so the first Apply to Each just checks a condition. We were having an issue with Excel dates sometimes being formatted as actual dates and sometimes being formatted as General or Text. So I just tried adding a condition to see whether the date fields contained slashes. If they do NOT, then I can surmise they were actually formatted as dates in Excel and are now coming in as integers that I need to transform into readable dates using Compose expressions. If they DO contain slashes, I surmise they are text and just write them directly to SharePoint. I see how the nested actions might cause problems, but the outputs indicate only 10 items created and the run history indicates only one run. On top of that, my testing went fine.  ??  Thanks very much for helping.

[Anonymous]

If the apply-to-each actions looped multiple times, wouldn't it be indicated in the output of the Create Item action? Also, that flow ran for only 56 seconds and ended successfully. It does not appear to have run long at all.

[rsaikrishna · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous 

In the Yes and No blocks, the Apply to each shouldn't be there as you already looping thru the list of rows from Excel with your first Apply to each.

In Create Item, you need to use expression as items('Apply_to_each')?['<Excel Column Name>'] in each field. This will avoid "ApplyEach Dates2" and "ApplyEach Dates" loops.

Regards

Krishna Rachakonda

If this reply helped you to solve the issue, please mark the post as Accepted Solution. Marking this post as Accepted Solution, will help many other users to use this post to solve same or similar issue without re-posting the issue in the group. Saves a lot of time for everyone.

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much. {*face palm*}. I had added the top Apply to Each and dragged my older Apply to Each inside of it, not realizing that I didn't really need it anymore. I have corrected the issue and removed the second loop.

[Anonymous]

I still wonder why it didn't duplicate items from my other test spreadsheets though.