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How to stop flow from failing if filter didn't find anything

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Posted on by MatiasN

Hello

I'll start off by saying that I don't know much about Power Automate and have mainly just been following a guide on how to make my specific flow, so I'm sorry if there is an obvious answer to this!

So I have a flow set up that automatically checks an excel sheet with various tasks and their deadlines and if it finds a deadline coming up within a certain amount of days it sends a reminder to the responsible person.

The way it works is that it checks one column to see if a task is marked as done or still in progress.

If it's still in progress it looks whether the deadline is exactly 30 or 14 days from now. If it is then it grabs the email from another column and sends the reminder.

This check runs every morning.

The problem is that it's far from every day that there is a deadline coming up and if there isn't then the flow fails. After 2 weeks of continous fails the flow automatically shuts off.

Is there some action I can add to my flow so that it doesn't fail, but simply ends if nothing is found matching the filters?

Thanks in advance!

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MarconettiMarco 3,812 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Hello @MatiasN ,
please share your flow in edit mode and the error you're getting, so that we could better help you.
BR,
Marco

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MatiasN 17 on at

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Hi @MarconettiMarco

Thank you for taking the time to help me! 🙂

Here is an image of the flow and error message

When the filter doesn't find anything the composes fail.Part 1 of the flowPart 2 of the flow

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MarconettiMarco 3,812 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Hello @MatiasN ,
please try to use this expression:
substring(variables('email list'),0,add(length(variables('email list')),-1))

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BR,
Marco

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MatiasN 17 on at

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Hi @MarconettiMarco

Unfortunately that gives the same error message.
It seems to me that the problem is that there's nothing for the compose steps to work with because nothing was found for that specific day with the conditions chosen. Afterall you can't remove the last character if there are no characters to begin with.
Is there some way to tell the flow to simply stop early if nothing was found?

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MarconettiMarco 3,812 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Hello @MatiasN ,
do you want to terminate the run if the "email list" variable is empty?

BR,
Marco

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MatiasN 17 on at

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Hi @MarconettiMarco

Does terminate mean that the flow will not go further for that day and then try again at the next set recurrence? If so that sounds like it could fix the problem.

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MarconettiMarco 3,812 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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yes @MatiasN ,
so you can for sure filter the excel rows with the email column not null, otherwise after your "Apply to each" control, add the "Condition" if the output of this expression length(variables('email list')) is greater than 0: if Yes, follow your Compose actions, if No Terminate.

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BR,
Marco

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MatiasN 17 on at

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Hi @MarconettiMarco

So what I believe is failing is that the filter looks for a date in the Deadline column that is todays date +14 and then it sees if the Status column is "In Progress" or "Pending". If such an entry exists it collects the email address in the Email column. Since there might be multiple emails in the same cells it then splits them at the ";".
What this all means is that if there is no In Progress/Pending deadline 2 weeks from the day the flow runs, then the filter output simply becomes [] and all the compose steps fail because they have no data to work with.
So it's not that there are null values in Excel, but that there are no entries matching the filters.

I tried adding the condition after Apply to Each as you suggested, but unfortunately it still fails. I believe maybe the condition has to come earlier in the flow? This is what it shows:

So I tried putting a condition right after the step that generates the empty data, but I get this error:

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MarconettiMarco 3,812 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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ok @MatiasN ,
please send the "Condition" screenshot in edit mode.

BR,
Marco

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MatiasN 17 on at

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Sorry @MarconettiMarco I had missed the "length" part of the expression, so I tried it again and it works perfectly now. Thank you so much for all your assistance and patience!

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