Microsoft 365 Community SharePoint, 10 Jan 2019

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From YouTube: Creating reminders for SharePoint using Microsoft Flow

Description

Creating reminders for SharePoint using Microsoft Flow demo taken from the SharePoint dev Special Interest Group recording at 10th of January 2019.

Presenter - Chakkaradeep (Chaks) Chinnakonda Chandran (Microsoft) - @chakkaradeep

More details on the SharePoint dev community calls from http://aka.ms/sppnp.

A

Okay, so if we go to my chewed-up video you'll see they both the announcements, page approvals and reminder flows, that's what I was initially showing and then I will just refresh this page. Just so clear. So here, I'm gonna show you the reminder flow demo. So reminder flow is a pretty something that I quite like based off of the columns. So you can see here contract renewal date and if you now drop open the flow menu, you will see that you have a new option concert a reminder: contact renewal date.

A

This only appears, if you have a date, column, custom date, column, if you don't have a custom date column. This that a reminder option would not appear in your list or library. So it's very contextual, and it's basically trying to suggest something to the user that you could do some actions using flow. So now as soon as I do that I'm gonna get the option to create a flow.

A

So I can, just you know, change the title to be relevant to whatever I want remind me this many days, so I can obviously put five to let's put one on the default and then click create. So now this will create a flow for myself and it will basically be set up to ensure that it can remind you a day before if any contact is to you so now, because the flow got created, it at least ran once so.

A

If I go to my menu, you can see that I do have one document that is going to be due in a day, and you can see that here 1:12.

A

So sorry, not the one tool, 1:11 and I get not in traders and I, say: hey! You have one document, you know to be the minder before the contract renewal date. So it's pretty simple and if users are very familiar with flow, they can basically go to their flow side and under my flows they will see the flow they Creator, so they have full control of this flow and by default this flow runs every day. With the recurrence trigger, you can go change the time in the timezone.

A

However, you want this to run my lives every day or every month or every week, and then you can see the logic that we use and it's pretty should go ahead and build this, because I think there are some tips and tricks of this flow itself.

A

If you want to gather how we build this thing, so the first thing is we capture the input and then we update it here in the flow in a variable, and then we get the profile to ensure that we know who we are sending this to, and then we create the query using which we can filter the items from the list. So basically we are looking at today, plus X days and the next days, plus one so we're doing so that we can accommodate date and time, because some columns would also have time.

A

So this is basically trying to do some mathematical calculation to arrive those dates and then we're getting the list name so right now. This is basically a thing that we have. We can use HTTP requests, but I think once we go to full 100%, you will see the template actually not having this action. Rather we would send it across from SharePoint to flow so ignore this for now and then. Finally, in the gate items you have the filter coil. So the filter query is basically now constructing the rest.

A

Api query if you want to filter the items based on date- and this is where it gets more complicated, but at least out of the box, if you don't change this actions for the user, it's basically a I created this flow, it's working or is it not working and then once I get the items I go through loop and then for each I generate get the metadata and then send a reminder.

A

Email now, one of the things you can see here in apply to each is that I basically use a string variable and then append it using the table row syntax in HTML, so that then, when I actually put the HTML in the email, it will now look very beautiful. The way I want it to look like, for example, over here.

A

So, there's a really good if you want to go look at this floor mode with words and and what we have done and if you want to send this along, not just yourself but your team, you know you could do that if you want to send this to your manager, you know you got get my profile, so you could get that as well or whichever the user manager is. So there a lot of good things here that we would be improving across the different stages of this flow.

A

So right now this is what we got with the reminder flow, and this is something this. This idea of suggesting flows based off of column type I think we would do more about this. For example, if you wanted, if you have a people, picker or people call a person column, and you want to remind something about to that person when something happens right, so those kind of scenarios we're looking at it. So if you have any more scenarios that you have been working across to, let us know and try this out.

A

Let us know this is a very small feature, but I feel like this is something that will be very useful. So let us know any feedback. You have.