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Prevent apply to each loop with SharePoint list and Azure DevOps

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Posted on by GoblinKingdom Microsoft Employee

Hello,

Forgive me, I know there are solutions on the site for this issue but I have attempted a few of them, but they dont seem to work as I would expect when applying them to my situation...or most likely I am not implmenting them correctly.

The flow, image below, is meant to be working as a ticketing tool / recording tool within Azure dev ops and email communcations.

An Email request comes in
the email subject is checked against a list
1. if the subject is not found on the list then a new AD work item is created
  1. Then a new entry of with the subject and the AD workitem ID is logged in a Sharepoint list
2. If the subject is found on the list & it is not flagged as closed then it updates the workitem via the AD workitem ID
  1. the update for this section has been removed.

My problem is that the call to SharePoint "get items" causes a loop and creats a new item for every current entry in the SharePoint list.

So my question is, how do I prevent the "apply to each" from running multiple times?

Thank you in advance!

Categories:

Building flows

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RezaDorrani 12,145 on at

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Hi @GoblinKingdom

Approach 1
When querying using get items you can use odata queries to filter the results
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/dynamicsnav-2016/hh169248(v=nav.90)
Next you can check the count of the get items query to see if items are returned based on your condition(filter query)
You can use the length expression to check the output
If length >0 then item found else not found

Approach 2
Next option would be in your for each loop you can set a variable value only when your condition is true
then outside of the loop check the variable value
if yes - then update
if no - then create

Regards,
Reza Dorrani

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly
Pstork1 69,665 Most Valuable Professional on at

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You can't really prevent the loop because Get Items will return a collection of items even if there is only one item retrieved. So you will have to have a loop. To prevent creation of multiple items you'll need to use the loop to aggregate the data into variables so that you can use those variables to create one item after the loop exits.
GoblinKingdom Microsoft Employee on at

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@Pstork1 I have seen this solution on other similiar threads, but i cant seem to get it to work properly for mine. Would you mind going into more detail about how to implement your suggestion?