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Add an attendee to an invite without emailing existing attendees

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Posted on by Matthew-dB

Hi there,

I am trying to build a flow where users can request an invitation to an event by submitting a Form. The flow works perfectly except for one thing - when I used the Update Event (V4) action it emails all attendees when someone gets added to the list (instead of just the new person). This even is expected to get hundreds of attendees, and I would really rather not that each attendee receives hundreds of emails for it!

Is there any way of adding an attendee and having the invite sent only to them (the same way you can do in the Outlook UI)?

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Building flows

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AnthonyAmador 2,553 Moderator on at

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Hi Matthew

Using the action "Update Event (V4)" there is no way to the attendees will not get a notification when you add someone to the meting, I found a post with the same problem you have and someone trying a different approach, it might works for you.

My workaround was to instead forward the invite to the event by doing the following:

1) Schedule the event manually and invite only myself
2) Create a utility flow to search and find the email message ID of the email that triggered when i scheduled the calendar event in step 1
3) In my actual flow, used the 'forward an email (V2)' and used the message ID of the email that i captured in step

Hope this helps.
Cheers.

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DavidHorsky 26 on at

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Hi, after a long week I found an elegant solution.
The update alarm for existing attendees doesn't trigger if you only manipulate attendees in the event and nothing else. This can be achieved by using an API through Send an HTTP request Outlook action.

1. Get the event ID and calendar ID. Either through Get events action (and filtering desired one), or read it of the URL in Outlook web app (just replace the '%3A' at the end with '=')
2. Then get the event details via Outlook HTTP Request (API returns attendees in better format than the Get Event action). If you use the Outlook HTTP action, you don't need any auth token, just connection with edit permissions to the target event.
URL: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/calendars/CalendarID/events/EventID
Method: GET
Content-type: application/json
leave the Body empty
3. Initialize an Array variable Var_Attendees and fill it with attendees from the response. i.e.:
body('Send_an_HTTP_request_-_get_attendees')?['attendees']
4. Append your new attendee to the array through Append to array variable action. The attendee object looks like this:
{
"type": "required",
"status": {
"response": "none",
"time": "0001-01-01T00:00:00Z"
},
"emailAddress": {
"name": "John Attendee",
"address": "john.attendee@contoso.com"
}
}
5. Update the event via Outlook HTTP Request.
URL: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/calendars/CalendarID/events/EventID
Method: PATCH
body: {"attendees": @{variables('Var_Attendees')}}
Content-type: application/json
6. Have a great day 🙂

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abonahoom 83 on at

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@DavidHorsky I'm trying to use this solution, however the event lives on a shared outlook calendar. How do I get the URL for the shared calendar?

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Nice workaround using "Outlook HTTP request". Created it as described and working. Our gmail users are gonna be happy. But the standard connector should be like this as it uses underwater the exact same Graph-API HTTP PATCH.

It shoud not mix up time-zone. It should leave unused properties untouched. And it shall allow for an additional property like : "noUpdateAll": true. I know such a property does not exits in Exchange backend, but it should.

A "noUdateAll" enables control by us, instead of some magic script in Exchange server that avoids an update to all. As we see, it simply does not work as it should.

Looking in a user's "inbox" and "deleted items" you can see how it works. The updates are sent, and received, but quicly moved to deleted. Nice, but not working for users using gmail.

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europaleta 2 on at

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Just wanted to leave a note for all who will useDavidHorsky's solution (which is awesome, by the way).

Note that if the event you're updating is the master event of a recurring series and has instances that have been updated separately, expect that multiple notification emails will be sent out to each newly added attendee: one for the master series and one per instance that has been updated, including past events in the series.

Hence, if you are setting up this solution for a recurring event, do it right from the start and avoid changes.

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