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Posted on by Fatal_Lordes

So I'm an absolute newbie to PA. I had never even heard of it until a couple days ago. So apologies in advance if what I'm asking is just plain dumb 🙂

My question is: Can PA allow me to create a script (or whatever you call it) so that it monitors a particular inbox and for all emails that arrive that meet a certain criteria (eg., from a particular person and with particular words in subject), it creates a calendar entry for the same outlook account BUT it selects the calendar start and end date and time from the content of said email. The email always contains this information in a set format, namely:

Date:

14/Feb/2023 23:59:00 AEST - 15/Feb/2023 06:00:00 AEST

Is this something that PA can do? I can either created it in the particular mailbox or (preferred), I can create it in my mailbox BUT it is looking at a shared inbox and it needs to put the calendar item in the shared calendar of the shared inbox. I don't think I should make this automatic upfront but instead make it do it should I flag the email in some way. Make sense? Is this even possible in PA? Thought I would ask that before I even start 🙂 Presently I have to do all that manually so if it could be automated, that would be great.... jut not sure if it is something that PA could do.

Thanks in advance.

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Fatal_Lordes 38 on at

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I've had a bit of a play and created a Flow and I said that within a particular folder, if an email is flagged that has a set from email and includes particular words in subject line, create a calendar item and I worked out how to create expressions to get the to and from date/time from the body... all good, BUT I can't seem to make it run? I have an email to meets the criteria but flagging it does nothing! What am I missing?

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Fatal_Lordes 38 on at

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Getting closer. It fails when I run it with "The string was not recognized as a valid DateTime. There is an unknown word starting at index 0.
clientRequestId: 349154ba-924f-426c-a912-491fa003d5b6", so now I'm trying to work out why. Originally I thought it was because when I first cut and paste my examples in the expression builder by examples, it included HTML. I've tried it with plain text now, for example: 01/Aug/2023 00:01:00 AEST – 01/Aug/2023 06:00:00 AEST, but I'm getting this error. Trying to work out how to fix it. 🙂

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Fatal_Lordes 38 on at

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Okay, I'm just not sure. I suspect it is the expression and maybe I need to somehow tell it that it is a date and time, but I'm not sure how to do that. Any help pointing me in right direction would be great. Below is screen shot of what I have. Basically, I'm telling it (I hope) to look in the body for the string similar to "01/Aug/2023 00:01:00 AEST – 01/Aug/2023 06:00:00 AEST" and just take the first part ("01/Aug/2023 00:01:00 AEST") for the start date/time and take the second part ("01/Aug/2023 06:00:00 AEST") for the end date/time.

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Fatal_Lordes 38 on at

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Ok, it is definitely a date format issue. I tried putting in a static start and end date and the flow ran, but I found two issues (aside from working out how to tell PA that the string it sorts from the expression is a date and time), namely:
It was using American date not Australian date format. Eg, for 01/08/2023, instead of putting the entry on 1 Aug, it put it on 8 Jan.
It put it in my personal calendar instead of the shared mailbox calendar.
So I'm slowly working out what it is doing but not sure how to fix these three issues.

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Chriddle 8,441 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Check out date format ISO 8601
This is the most reliable way of handling dates in Office.

Your mentioned date can be parsed as follows:

parseDateTime( '01/Aug/2023 00:01:00 AEST', 'en-GB', 'dd/MMM/yyyy hh:mm:ss AEST' )

Output: 2023-08-01T00:01:00.0000000

If you need UTC:

convertTimeZone( parseDateTime( '01/Aug/2023 00:01:00 AEST', 'en-GB', 'dd/MMM/yyyy hh:mm:ss AEST' ), 'AUS Eastern Standard Time', 'UTC' )

Output: 2023-07-31T14:01:00.0000000Z

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