Timestamp Errors When Pulling Actions (flow seemingly broke overnight)

David Kortes

Hi Everyone,

This is going to include a lot of pictures to try and convey this strange problem I've just encountered, so bear with me.

I have had a recurring flow to grab certain actions from NXT every hour to populate specific buckets in MS Planner. A separate flow then acts as a notification system to notify development officers when these actions are completed.

For the past 8 months everything had been going great, using addHours(utcnow(), -1) I was able to grab actions from the hour in between runs and populate with no worries. Now, seemingly overnight everything broke even though I have not touched a single thing. Below is how the flow is currently being started:

Even without actions created within the past hour the flow would work as intended, but return a blank array in the value output, this last successful run was at 1/18/2025 11:23:06 PM.

Ran at 1/18/2025 11:23:06 PM

Now, an hour later with the exact same parameters, the entire flow fails and returns an error saying that the value output is now returning a null value instead of a blank array.

Thinking that this was just some change in the back end to no longer return blank arrays I decided to leave it thinking that it would still pull actions as they appear.

4 days have passed and over these days I have continued to receive failures on each and every run even though actions were being assigned to me in NXT. Realizing this was a bigger issue I decided to test to see what was going on.

Replicating my original flow and setting the “Added on or after” parameter through AddHours(utcnow(), -5) to make sure I'm grabbing everything, but I STILL receive the same error and it saying there had been no actions created in NXT.

I then went through and set the time to 00:00:00 to make sure the action actually was in the system and sure enough, it was.

Through this I noticed that the time stamp for the action was somehow behind my expression's time though I ran this in the same hour the NXT action was created.

Taking that timestamp from the date_added line and replacing my expression returns the correct action.

Does anyone know why utc now would no longer work out of the blue like this? Any help would be greatly appreciated as having this be recurring is a necessity.

Thanks everyone!

Alex Wong

@David Kortes
from the list action info, you can see that date_added has timezone specified (-05:00) at the end. I don't know if something did or didn't change as you said it was previously working and now it isn't anymore. I think you can look back at run history to determine if date_added info has change or not. Run history has 30 days of history, so you can go back to previously “working run” and compare the “list actions” action's input and output to determine if “time zone” is taken into consideration or not.

I just tried this and date/time specified in UTC will give me action added correctly.

date_added is 2025-01-22T00:00:00Z (UTC time for 1/22/2025 midnight), it returned actions with date added 2025-01-21T19:02:51.27-05:00, which means the action was added on 1/21/2025 7:02:51PM EST, if you convert this to UTC time, it is 1/22/2025 12:02:51AM. So it is working properly for me