Delaying email send from flow.

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Posted on by BMP

Good morning,

I hope someone can help me please.

I created a flow which creates a certificate and sends an email to a student, once they've filled out a Microsoft form.

The flow I used was this - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/educator-developer-blog/automate-event-certificates-in-10-easy-steps/ba-p/2742405

What I want to do is delay the email with the attachment being sent, until after 15:30, but I want the students to be able to fill the form out at any time. Is this possible?

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Building flows

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VictorIvanidze 13,073 on at

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Yes that's possible. We've created a commercial solution that delays emails - see https://www.ivasoft.com/delayoutofhoursemails.shtml

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Kapil775 28 on at

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Hi @BMP ,

Not the best of the solution and probably you would have already thought about it, we can have two flows as below.

Flow 1
1. This flow will have Microsoft Forms trigger.
2. Create the certificate and save it to one drive folder.
3. Update certificate path and form submitter's email ID in an excel.

Flow 2
1. This flow will be scheduled at 15:30.
2. Iterate through each rows of excel and send email with certificate as attachment.
3. During each iteration, delete current row from excel after sending email.

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Rhiassuring 8,690 Moderator on at

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Hi there,

Try this out:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Flows/Delay-until-specific-time-every-day/m-p/928585#M130382

It basically has a condition for "is it before or after X time" -- if it is before, wait until that time; if it is after, wait until tomorrow at that time. Instead of 17:00, of course, you'd use 15:30.

Let me know if you need assistance modifying it for your needs.

R

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BMP 18 on at

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Good morning, @VictorIvanidze @Kapil775 @Rhiassuring

Thank you all for sending me these solutions which I will try today.

If I email the MS Form to 30 students and ask them to all fill it out at the same time, triggering the flow to operate with 30 different forms being converted into a certificate. Can the flow operate more than one at at time? or is this going to cause problems too?

Will delaying the email cause any issues with this too?

Sorry, these are probably very simple questions, but I'm new to this.

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BMP 18 on at

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Good morning,

Thank you for this flow. The code mentions a timezone conversion and the timezone in the example is China, I'm located in the UK so I tried replacing the bold area with "GMT Standard Time" but my flow won't accept it.

convertTimeZone(outputs('Get_response_details')?['body/submitDate'],'UTC','China Standard Time','HH:mm:ss')

Thank you.

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Rhiassuring 8,690 Moderator on at

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Hi @BMP -

This should answer your question:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Flows/How-Many-Instances-Of-The-Same-Flow-Can-Run-At-The-Same-Time-Per/m-p/849536#M118976

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BMP 18 on at

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Please ignore this, it appears to be accepting it.

I will test the flow now and see if the emails go out later today at 15:30, thank you again for your help.

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BMP 18 on at

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Good morning, R,

Sorry to trouble you again. The flow worked perfectly until I noticed that the information being put out was an hour behind, we are currently working with our time zone at +1 hour for daylight savings. Our clocks go forward for one hour between March and October.

I've tried changing the expression and nothing seems to work, could you help me please?

convertTimeZone(outputs('Get_response_details')?['body/submitDate'],'UTC','GMT Standard Time','HH:mm:ss')

I've tried adding +01:00 after UTC and GMT, both have failed.

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