Deleting event in sequence does not fire a delete event on Outlook - Deleted, Updated, Modified trigger

(4) Share

Report

Posted on by Community Power Pla...

I have built a workflow to do a 1 way sync from my O365 calendar to my google calendar.

The following scenarios seem to work:

add event (create event in gcal)
add a series of events (this fires as multiple adds, see above)
edit event (event exist in gcal, so update)
edit event (event missing in gcal, so add)
delete event (delete event in gcal)
delete series of events (fires as multiple single delete calls)
edit all events in series (this fires as a serias of single updates, so hadled by normal edit flow)
edit single event in series (update event in gcal)

My problem is that if I delete an event in a series in outlook, the flow is triggered with an ActionType of 'updated' for all the events in the series that were not deleted, and there is no event sent for the actual item that was deleted. I looked to see if there is a trigger specific to the delete action (like there is for add or modify) but there isn't. Is this a bug? Or is there another way to accomplish this?

Categories:

Building flows

I have the same question (0)

All responses (4)

Answers (0)

kirktastic 7 on at

Like (0)

Report

Has anyone figured this out? I'm doing something very similar (to a sharepoint calendar rather than gcal, but same concept). I have everything working except I ran into this same road block for an individual event delete from a series.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
kirktastic 7 on at

Like (1)

Report

I have yet to come across a good solution to this issue, but I have created a workaround in my flow (which I don't like because it is very inefficient, but it is all that I've been able to come up with yet). The problem is that after an Outlook event series is created, any modification to individual events in the series (whether it's updating a single event or deleting a single event) is treated the same by Outlook. When you do this Outlook doesn't send out a single trigger for that event but rather sends out individual triggers for every event in the series as an update trigger, where every event that you did not update just gets "updated" with the same info it had before. It's a really inefficient way for Microsoft to handle this with Outlook events that they really need to change.

In the meantime, my workaround is that I added a column to my Sharepoint calendar list to save the data from the trigger header called "xMsRequestId" and now every time a new event is created or updated I have that Id updated for the event as well on my Sharepoint list. This is a unique identifier for the action that caused the trigger, and when all of those update triggers happen for all of the events in the series they all have that same Id in the header.

So here's what I use it for: whenever a trigger for the flow is an event update, I check if it is a part of a series (by checking if the trigger output "body/Recurrence" is not "none"). If it is an update to an event and if the event is part of a series, then I do a 'Get Sharepoint Items' for my list filtered on both the 'body/Series master ID' and and that are not equal to 'header/xMsRequestId'. This indicates that those are stale events since their last update was from an earlier xMsRequestId. I then tell it to delete all of those stale events. This way as all of the additional triggers flood in for all of the individual event updates, I then see that those don't exist yet and add them as new events in the list with the new xMsRequestId. At the end of all of the triggers completing their way through the flow, you are left with all of the events in the series being refreshed on my Sharepoint calendar and the one that had been deleted in Outlook is now missing on Sharepoint as well since it did not have its own update trigger.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
kirktastic 7 on at

Like (0)

Report

And I want to reiterate: this works but is very inefficient due to the looping that has to occur combined with the fact that it has to run on EVERY event in the series each time any change is made. I have a recurring event on the Outlook calendar that is every weekday with no end date. With this method it technically works, but when you make an update to any events in that series there are so many triggers that happen that it will churn for days before finally completing them all. I would love it if MS would fix this issue with Outlook recurring events. The way this should work is that updates to individual Outlook events in a series should be treated as individual event actions rather than artificially affecting the entire series. You shouldn't need to push out updates to an entire series just because one event in the series was modified or deleted. They all have the seriesMasterId tying them together, that should be enough to keep them connected without having to send updates to everything.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Kit Englund 36 on at

Like (0)

Report

Thanks so much for your Post. I also wish Microsoft would fix this as the Delete is acting like the Master ID is the Meeting ID, rather than on the create and update actions where it has both present. It doesn't make sense not to keep the same structure for deleting, that it passes an ID and Master ID still. I assume it's some legacy code debt, probably back in the 90s when someone first coded Reoccurring meetings and didn't think about API or RPA :)

Anyway, this was the only other post I could find that actually discussed this issue. And I've been searching for a good 2-3 hours using all sorts of search criteria and across multiple sites. So really appreciate that you took the time to document this.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No