Unanswered

Updating or Creating a SharePoint calendar item

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by SAHoff

I'm trying to create a flow that activates when a date is added to a column in one SharePoint list and adds that date as an event on a separate SharePoint calendar or modifies an existing calendar event if the date has changed. My problem is that I'm using Get Items to search the calendar for existing events and then a condition to test whether those events have the same name. But because of the Apply to Each loops on each returned item, my actions after the condition occur multiple times.

So the first part all works. When someone modifies the date column in the first list, the flow triggers and Gets Items from the calendar, filtered on the correct category for the type of event.

The problem is in the second half. I want the flow to check if the existing calendar items match the title of the list item with the changed date. If there is a matching existing calendar item, I want to update it. If there is not an existing calendar item, I want to create one. What happens is, the flow creates duplicate calendar items, one for each of the Get Items values it has collected, because the entire condition applies to each Get Items value. How do I get it to only modify or create a single calendar entry?

And then a second question is, what can I add to the flow to have it delete an existing calendar entry entirely if the date is deleted from the SharePoint list rather than modified?

Thanks for your help!

Categories:

Building flows

I have the same question (0)

All responses (5)

Answers (0)

lbendlin 8,474 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

Like (0)

Report

For the first question - add a variable to the flow, set it to True before processing. In each loop check if the variable is true. Only process the calendar event if that is the case. Then set it to False after the (first) calendar entry has been processed.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
SAHoff 59 on at

Like (0)

Report

Yes, thank you. I'm trying to set this up with a Do Until loop, but I'm not sure how to set the variable to false after just the first calendar entry. It's still completing all of the entries and then setting the variable to false. Is there some setting I'm missing here? I did turn on concurrency control at the Apply to Each level and set Parallelism to 1. Should I not have done that?

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
SAHoff 59 on at

Like (0)

Report

Here's the loop, but still getting multiple calendar entries:

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
lbendlin 8,474 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

Like (0)

Report

hard to tell without seeing the entire flow . The piece you are showing seems to be ok.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
SAHoff 59 on at

Like (0)

Report

Okay, let's see.
1. When a list item is created or modified we go ahead and initialize the variable for later and then check to see if the date column was changed:
2. If the date column has been changed, we convert the time zone for that date and then moving to the calendar, get all existing events in a certain category. This is the beginning of the problem, because future actions occur, unnecessarily, for each one of these items that are retrieved.
3. For each calendar item value, we check to see if the Title matches the Title of the trigger list item. If the item already exists as a calendar entry, it gets modified. If not, a new calendar entry is created (except the problem is it's creating duplicate new entries).
And the settings for the Apply to each calendar item look like this:
4. If no calendar item exists, this Do Until loop is supposed to limit the flow to creating a single calendar item and then stopping, but instead we're still getting the same number of new items as there were values from the Get Calendar Items action in #2 above. Can't figure out how to set up the loop to quit after only one value is processed.

Really appreciate any insight you may have. I feel like I'm missing something obvious here, but I've been staring at it too long.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No