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Planner Task : check for recurring tasks

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Posted on by GF-14081615-0

Hello everyone !

I have a pretty big cloud flow that take all the Planner tasks from a variety of groups (at least 150) and export them in an Excel file and refresh a PowerBI Dataset.
Now, I had no problem whatsoever with the export, I used From Planner to Excel - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com) as reference and it worked quite great.

The only struggle I had is : Some of the tasks are recurring. And I would like to flag them as such in the Excel file.

What I looked into :
I know using Graph API in the beta version is possible (https://stackoverflow.com/a/76094907/1237712; Configuring task recurrence in Planner (preview) - Microsoft Graph | Microsoft Learn). But the problem with beta is that it might be subject to change. And I certainly do not want any change on Production.

So, I figured I had to pass through a workaround.
I know that the recurring tasks have the same Title, and no other not-part-of-that-recurrence-task will have the same title, are stored in the same Bucket and have different DueDates (in this particular project, the recurring tasks will repeat yearly).

And, well, with the "List all tasks" action, I get the whole tasks of one Planner !

I know I'm a finger closed to know how to retrieve the Recurring tasks, and I think a JSON Parse, or a filter array could work, but I struggle figuring how to do it and optimize it in the best way possible.

What I currently have :
This is a bit of my flow, where I retrieve the list of tasks in a Group's plan.

Here is the output of the List of Tasks, with one particular task :

{
 "statusCode": 200,
 "headers": {
 //...
 },
 "body": {
 "@odata.context": "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/$metadata#Collection(microsoft.graph.plannerTask)",
 "@odata.count": 12,
 "value": [
 {
 "@odata.etag": "BIGETAG",
 "planId": "planID",
 "bucketId": "bucketID",
 "title": "Permit - update",
 "orderHint": "orderHint",
 "assigneePriority": "",
 "percentComplete": 0,
 "createdDateTime": "2023-06-01T08:15:28.1774729Z",
 "hasDescription": true,
 "previewType": "automatic",
 "referenceCount": 0,
 "checklistItemCount": 0,
 "activeChecklistItemCount": 0,
 "priority": 5,
 "id": "taskID",
 "createdBy": {
 "user": {
 "id": "userID"
 },
 "application": {
 "displayName": null,
 "id": "id"
 }
 },
 "appliedCategories": {
 "category8": true,
 "category12": true
 },
 "assignments": {},
 "_assignments": []
 },
 { ...}
 ]
 }
}

Here is the part where I add a row to the excel file :

And the action "Add a row to an excel table" part :

I only need to put "Yes/No" in the "IsRecurring" column.

So, could you help me figure out how to flag Recurring Planner Tasks to be exported in an Excel file please ?

Thanks a lot !

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Building flows

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RMCoder 219 on at

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From my research and experimentation, the property you are looking for is recurrence which has sub-properties such as seriesId, occurrenceId, etc.

Unfortunately, this only seems to be accessible via the Graph API and not via any of the standard Planner actions.

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GF-14081615-0 62 on at

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Thanks for your answer @RMCoder , can you tell me if you saw that with Graph API 1.0 or beta version please ?

On my side, I only saw the "recurrence" property on the Beta version, and unfortunately the beta version is still under test and modifications from MS. It is not recommended for production.

Sources :
Beta API :
we recommend that you use the beta version only to test apps that are in development; do not use beta APIs in your production apps
Use the Microsoft Graph API - Microsoft Graph | Microsoft Learn
Reccurence doc (only uses Beta in the code samples) : Configuring task recurrence in Planner (preview) - Microsoft Graph | Microsoft Learn

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RMCoder 219 on at

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On my side, I only saw the "recurrence" property on the Beta version, and unfortunately the beta version is still under test and modifications from MS. It is not recommended for production.
I saw the same, only the beta at this time.

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GF-14081615-0 62 on at

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Here is what @RMCoder and all the doc I read confirmed (as I wrote it in the subject) :
There is currently no Out-of-the-Box solution to check wether a task is recurrent/periodic in the production Graph API (version 1.0).
It only exists in Beta version, which is not recommended for production environment by MS itself.

I did not find any other solution to check that (except for a real headache "create an array, browse all task and check the array, then update array etc), so I am giving up on that idea.

Thanks for your time @RMCoder 🙂

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CorinneMaertens 2 on at

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Hi,

Your idea of checking for recurring tasks made me thinking of the following solution. I put it in my flow and it gives the desired result. I also looked in the graph explorer but the "recurring"-tag is not there for tasks.

See below the screenshots of how I determined if a task is recurring. (Maybe it's a short cut because I only base this on the Title of the task but you could extend it to Title+bucket).

2 variables to check the recurrence:

Condition to check for recurring task after getting the list of tasks:
First condition uses the variable "checkRecurringTasks".
The second condition uses the variable "recurringTasks".
Both validate against the "Title" of the task.

Condition false:
Condition true:

After the condition the variable "recurringTasks" will contain the tasks which are recurring.

Use the array "recurringTasks" in the step "Append to array variable - plannerData" check if the tag "recurring" should be populated with "yes" ("ja") of "no" ("nee"):

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