Attached are a breakout of the flows with settings, and a screen shot of the excel file. The Excel file is located within %Sharepoint%\Documents\{excel_file}.xlsx
For additional information, "Comments" is a multiline text field. So I am having the flow dump data in there as well just to see what is being seen. When I run it, any field that is being read (e.g. Start, Finish) does not get copied over. But I was not looking at all fields. So this morning, I added another test to see what was being read. I added "Title" from the Excel file to be written into the SP\Comments. When I ran the flow then, Ex\Title copied into the SP\Comments field no problem.
For a reference, here is the information in SP\Comments:
- sta = item()?['Start'] - , fin = 'item()?['Finish']' - string(item()?['Finish'])) - utcNow() = item()?['Title']
bold = dynamic context or function. There are ' surrounding item()?['Finish']. I was testing to see if that was the issue. It did not make a difference. The various - and = are just dividers to delineate where data should be. The last run of the test resulted in this data in SP\Comments:
- sta = - , fin = '' - - 2025-03-04T13:16:49.3244583Z = B1.C.3220
I highlighted the corresponding outputs so you could see what is where. You can see there are no spaces where the item()? is supposed to be.
So I have confirmed the following:
- The flow is capable of reading SP\Title and Ex\Title and compare the 2 text strings
- The flow is capable of reading SP\staDate and Ex\Start and compare the 2 dates
- The flow is capable of reading SP\finDate and Ex\Finish and compare the 2 dates
- The flow is capable of copying the text from Ex\Title and pasting it into SP\Comments
Issues:
- When trying to copy the information from Ex\Start to SP\staDate, the flow cannot interpret the data and results in a null.
- When trying to copy the information from Ex\Finish to SP\finDate, the flow cannot interpret the data and results in a null.
Tested variances:
- Setting DateTime format in "List rows present in a table" as Serial number => FAIL (results in null)
- Setting DateTime format in "List rows present in a table" as ISO 8601 => FAIL (results in null)
- Setting Ex\Start column formatted as "Date (3/14/2012)" => FAIL (results in null)
- Setting Ex\Start column as "Number" => FAIL (results in null)
In the flow functions, I have also tried:
- formatDateTime(item()?['Start']),'MM/dd/yyyy') => FAIL (crashes flow when going to SP\staDate, null when going to SP\Comments)
- string(item()?['Start'])) - FAIL (crashes flow) => FAIL (crashes flow when going to SP\staDate, null when going to SP\Comments)
- formatDateTime(string(item()?['Start'])),'MM/dd/yyyy') => FAIL (crashes flow when going to SP\staDate, null when going to SP\Comments)
More testing updates:
When I look at the raw outputs for the "List Rows", it shows that "Start": "2025-03-03T00:00:00.0000Z", so I am getting data into the flow. But when I look at the raw input for the "Update item", it shows "Start": null. So somewhere/how I am losing the data or connection to that information.
