Delay Until 2am

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Posted on by tomh

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Hello All:

I have a simple Approval flow that triggers upon recurrence every 3 days. It gets file properties and if file approval=pending it sends email to approver for approval. Our biggest challenge is that users are often in the files needing to be approved. Therefor when the the approver approves and the flow tries to update the file properties to 'Approve' it cannot do so because the file is locked for editing. The flow continues and errors but the approver is not aware of the fact that the file properties have not been updated. Then again on the third day they receive an email for approval of the same file because the properties are still=pending becuase the file was locked for editing and the metadata could not be updated on previous attempt. I have worked with this flow for months now and have tried just about everything. The only thing I have left is to try to add some kind of delay function into the flow to update the file properties at a specific time when the least amount of users are potentially in the file, say 2am.

I am open to options here. I have not been able to successfully implement a delay in such a way that would only update at 2am. The closest I have been able to get is to delay updating for a given amount of hours say 10 hours. This presents a problem as well as hours of business are roughly between 6am and 6pm. So even if an approver approves at 6am sharp the metadata would then be updated at 4pm, which still falls between our business hours thus potentially leaving the file locked for editing.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks all!

Tom

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Re: Delay Until 2am

@tomh ,

You could calculate how many hours are between utcNow() and 2am tomorrow and have the flow delay for that amount of time:

the flow in the below screenshot does the following:

1. Converts the current time in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time) to local timezone and returns only the Hours number (from a 24-hour format, so 1:00PM=13).

2. subtracts the current hour from 26 and returns that figure. 26 is the number of hours there are from 00:00 on day one to 0200 (2:00AM) the following day. this calculation determines how many hour there are from right now to 0200 tomorrow morning.

3. delays the flow for that many hours

the expressions that you need are in the action block comments in the screenshot.

I hope this helps!

thanks,
Kyle

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Paulie78 8,418 Moderator on at

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Re: Delay Until 2am

Is there a reason that I am not understand that you cannot just use the delay until action?

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tom_riha 10,179 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Re: Delay Until 2am

Hello @tomh ,
to delay until 2am the next day you can use the following expression inside 'Delay until' action.
addHours(utcNow('yyyy-MM-dd'),26,'yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mmZ')
utcNow('yyyy-MM-dd') will give you today's date at 00:00, to which you use the addHours() expression to add 26 hours to get tomorrow 2am and format it as 'yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mmZ' to fit the requirements of the 'Delay until' action.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Re: Delay Until 2am

It looks like I like doing things the hard way... @Paulie78 and @tom_riha 's solutions are much more simple and elegant.

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Paulie78 8,418 Moderator on at

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Re: Delay Until 2am

@Anonymous don't feel too bad about it. I came up with an elaborate solution also, which I think is quite neat! That is when I noticed delay until 😥

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tomh 159 on at

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Re: Delay Until 2am

@tom_riha
Thank you for this. Are you saying that utcNow always returns time of 00:00? So, adding any hours to that figure will always update at set time regardless of whether the approval occurs at 7am or 3pm?

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tom_riha 10,179 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Re: Delay Until 2am

@tomh
Expression utcNow() without parameter returns date and time when the action was executed = now. But you if you add a format parameter where you ignore the time part utcNow('yyyy-MM-dd') it'll give you 00:00 time.

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tomh 159 on at

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Re: Delay Until 2am

Does this look correct?

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tom_riha 10,179 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Re: Delay Until 2am

Yes, that looks just fine. 🙂

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tomh 159 on at

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Re: Delay Until 2am

@tom_riha
Thank you again for this. I will test now and report back the success.

Tom

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