Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

I am developing an automated onboarding system for the company I work at, and am having trouble coming up with a streamlined and foolproof way to "link" form responses.

The System

First, HR submits a form for a new employee onboarding, which activates the first flow (HR flow). This flow captures the form responses and places them in a table in a sharepoint-linked excel spreadsheet. It then sends an email (Outlook) to the supervisor that HR selected asking them to fill out a seperate form.

Once submitted, it activates the second flow (Supervisor flow), which saves the supervisor form data into the same spreadsheet, but a different table.

The Issue

I need the HR form and the Supervisor form to stay seperate, as HR and the supervisor will be answering completely different questions. However, I have no way to know which employee the supervisor is filling their form out for. For example, if HR submits three forms in quick succession, but the supervisors selected take a while to fill out theirs, and then complete them out of order, it causes the supervisor data to be saved out of order.

Current Solution (not elegant)

The HR flow generates a numeric key (just counts up for each form submission starting with 1) and saves that key in both the HR and Supervisor tables, and sends it to the supervisor in the email requesting their response that I mentioned above. The supervisor enters this key into one of the form questions when prompted, which allows the Supervisor flow to "know" which line to place the supervisor data on. The issue with this solution is that the form doesn't know what key they SHOULD be entering, and so the supervisor can easily enter an invalid key, which would cause the Supervisor flow to save data in the wrong line, potentially overwriting other existing data. It also is an extra requirement for the supervisor to complete, which is not ideal either.

So is there a way for me to give the supervisor flow some way of knowing what new hire the data should be saved for, that DOES NOT require the supervisor to manually input data, such as a name? (Because names are easily misspelled, and so I couldn't data match)

Let me know if you need further information regarding my forms, flows, tables, or environment. I may be overlooking something simple; I have never used power automate before, and am learning as I go.

Thanks!

Joshua Minett

Categories:

Building flows