Sharing my Power Automate Flow (update): Connection NXT Actions, MS Planner and SharePoint Lists

Nicole Holt
Nicole Holt Community All-Star
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
in SKY Developer General Discussions

I am sharing our 3-part NXT workflow that links NXT Actions to MS Planner Tasks. We use this in the context of grant management (research/application/writing/reporting), and this updates a flow that I shared a while back as our process has refined.

A general overview of automation (NXT Actions, Planner Tasks):

Required connections: RENXT, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Lists, Microsoft Power Automate

Skill level: Intermediate

Things you'll need to configure:

  • SharePoint List: You'll need to create a SharePoint list. The columns you absolutely need in this list are NXT Action ID and Planner Task ID. Depending on how you format your Planner Tasks--or if you also want to use this list as a quick tabular reference--you might want more columns.

    The columns for my list are: Constituent, ActionID, Action Link, Action Type, Status Description, Assigned To, Action Date, Opportunity Name, OpportunityID, Opportunity Status PlannerID, Planner Task Status, ConsSysID, Date Created, Date Last Modified
  • Workflow 1 (NXT Actions → Planner Tasks):
    • Review the ‘Convert Time Zone’ to make sure this flow is right for your time zone.
    • The flow uses a condition based on the NXT Action Type--ours start with “Grant”). You should configure this to collect the actions you want to include in Planner.
    • Because our team uses monthly Planner boards, we pull the Month of an action's due date and use a switch function to funnel these actions into the correct Planner board. You may not need this, or you may want to sort your actions into planner boards based on some other field, like maybe action type or a custom field.
    • This flow stores Planner Task ID as an action custom field (text field)--you'll need to add that attribute
  • Workflow 2 (NXT Action updates → SharePoint List → Planner Task):
    • This flow builds off the earlier flows. It pulls actions modified on or after yesterday, and uses the action's existence on the SharePoint list to update Planner tasks (due date, description). It also updates the SharePoint list details in case you are using that list as a reference.
  • Workflow 3 (Mark NXT Action completed when Planner Task completed):
    • This flow builds off the earlier flows.
    • Trigger: When planner task is completed--you'll need to build one of these flows for each planner board you use (I have 12, because we use monthly boards).
    • The ID of the completed task is used to get the NXT Action ID from SharePoint list. You'll need to update the Sharepoint “Get Item” action through the Filter Query to make sure that it is pulling the correct column for you list. To make sure you're getting the correct column name, click the gear icon on the upper right corner of your list & select “List settings”
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Click the appropriate column header for your PlannerID column

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Look at the URL on the resulting page.

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That is the field name you'll need in the Get Items filter query:

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Comments

  • Kim Wolcott
    Kim Wolcott
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Nicole Holt
    Have you tried to add the fundraiser(s) from the action into assigned in the planner task? I am stuck here.

  • Nicole Holt
    Nicole Holt Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    @Kim Wolcott we aren't doing that at this point, primarily because often the people assigned don't have RENXT rights (and so aren't fundraisers). Our grants team makes the assignments within Planner.

    I think you should be able to get the fundraiser's email address and use that in the ‘assign to’ part of Planner. In the example below I got the email addresses via a string attribute, then cut off the last two characters (a semicolon and space added during the append process), but someoneelse might have a more elegant solution.

    20479864d11a7149dfff3568ee2621a8-huge-im

    edit--sorry, now I'm seeing how small that pasted flow is. Here it is, written:

    1. add an ‘Initialize Variable’ at the beginning of your flow. This one is named ‘assigned to’ and is a string
    2. you'll get your action, as in the original flow, but you'll add a ‘get constituent’ item, and in that you'll add ‘Fundraiser(s) Item’. This will create an Apply to Each loop as multiple fundraisers can be assigned.
    3. Within that Apply to Each loop, add an Append to String Variable item. You're appending to the ‘assigned to’ variable, and adding the primary email address, followed by “; ”
    4. outside your ‘apply to each’ you can eitehr create a compose item OR you can add this directly in the ‘create a planner task’ action under the assigned-to field:
      substring(variables('assign to'), 0, sub(length(variables('assign to')), 2))
      this will put all those email addresses in, separated by a semicolon, but will take off the last two characters--which should be a semicolon and space.
  • Kim Wolcott
    Kim Wolcott
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Nicole Holt Thank you SO much! I got it to work.

  • Nicole Holt
    Nicole Holt Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    @Kim Wolcott I'm glad it's working for you!

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