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reject parallel meetings

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Posted on by Fullytasker

Hello!

I need a cloud-based workflow that performs the following actions: every time I receive a meeting invitation in Outlook, my workflow should retrieve information from my calendar and check if I have another meeting scheduled at that time. If I have another meeting at the same time or within the duration of that time slot, I need the workflow to decline the meeting. I tried to create a workflow for this, but I was not successful. I need this flow cause im getting to much invitations to meetings in the same time

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WillPage 2,339 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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This is a great question because the Filter Query is hard to do with the Get events action! However, you can do it with the Filter Query .

Firstly, trigger your flow when a new event is created. Then add a Get events (V4) action and add the following Filter Query:
In text format, it would be this:
(start/dateTime ge '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/start']}' and end/dateTime ge '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/start']}') or (start/dateTime le '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/end']}' and end/dateTime le '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/end']}')

This action will return any existing meetings that either overlap or directly touch the newly arrived meeting. If you are OK with adjacent meetings, then change ge to gt and le to lt (greater or equal to greater than, and less or equal to less than).

Next filter the results to exclude the event which triggered the flow

You can now do a condition. If the previous action returns at least one result, you can delete the incoming event, or add an action to decline it or whatever
Fullytasker 37 on at

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Hello Will!

Tks for your time and for the help!

I will test the flow, and as soon as it's okay, I'll give you feedback. I would like to thank you immensely for your help so far, especially because my brain was on fire trying to create an ODATA for the FilterQuery ahahahahahaahahah
WillPage 2,339 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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@Fullytaskergood luck. There's an extra condition I forgot - when an incoming meeting starts before and ends after an existing meeting. Make the filter query like this:
(start/dateTime le '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/start']}' and end/dateTime gt '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/start']}') or (start/dateTime lt '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/end']}' and end/dateTime ge '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/end']}') or (start/dateTime ge '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/start']}' and end/dateTime le '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/end']}')

In pseudocode it's like this.. match on the following conditions:

IF:
An existing meeting start time is at or before the start time of the new meeting AND the existing meeting end time is after the start time of the new meeting.
OR
An existing meeting start time is before the end time of the new meeting AND the existing meeting end time is at or after the end time of the new meeting
OR
An existing meeting start time is at or after the new meeting start time AND the existing meeting end time is at or before the new meeting end time.
Fullytasker 37 on at

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Hello Will!

Please, let me ask you a question.

In my Outlook/Teams, the trigger "When a New Event is Created" just doesn't work the way I want it to because this trigger assumes that a new meeting has already been accepted. On the other hand, the "When an event is added, updated, or deleted" trigger works better because it doesn't just create a permanent meeting. I'm not sure if I'm being clear, but in summary, there is a possibility that the flow starts with the "When an event is added, updated, or deleted" trigger, and after that, it compares the times of my meetings in my calendar to check if there is a possibility of a "parallel meeting." If there is a possibility, it automatically creates a condition to check who is adding this meeting. If it's a particular person, it does nothing, but if it checks that it's not this person, it simply rejects the invitation with a message. I attached a file to help you understand.
WillPage 2,339 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Yeah that all makes sense. As long as your trigger outputs a start time and end time, which that trigger does, then you can feed that into the Odata filter. You might want to use a trigger condition to prevent it triggering on a delete, by going into the settings of the trigger and adding an expression like @not(equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/ActionType'],'deleted'))
You can get who it's from using the organizer field from dynamic content, which will contain the user ID of the person who created it. You can run your condition based on that... Do a compose and add user IDs in an array like this:
Now your condition can be like the array contains the organizer:
Fullytasker 37 on at

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Hello Will!

Please, let me show you how im creating the flow.

First i added the "When an event is added, updated or deleted" with the @not(equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/ActionType'],'deleted')) mod inside the configs, as you see below.

Second i added the "Get Events" with the extra conditions.
As you can see, I added the 'Start time with time zone' and 'End time with time zone' because if I only added 'Start time' and 'End time,' when a meeting is added, it gets the wrong time zone. For example, when my teammates invite me to a meeting, this meeting uses UTC time instead of my time zone here in Brazil. So, I need to convert the time zone from UTC to -03:00 because it's my time zone. I don't know how to do this conversion correctly.

So, if we get the possibility to convert the time to the correct time zone, after that I added the filter array and the following condition.

After that, where do i organize this following part of the flow?
Fullytasker 37 on at

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Hello @WillPage !

Sorry to bother!

Can you help me with the points above?
Fullytasker 37 on at

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Hello!

Can someone help me out?
WillPage 2,339 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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@FullytaskerI can't figure out what your question is. One thing to note though, is you should work in UTC. The timestamps of the event start and end time are in UTC - you shouldn't need to convert to your local time zone because the newly created event has start and end times in UTC and the existing events all have start and end times in UTC too. As long as they are the same timezone (UTC) then the query will work.
Converting timezones adds confusion because if the person who sent the meeting request is in a different timezone, then the start and end times with the timezone will be in THEIR timezone, not yours. So stick to UTC!