Next up in my selection of automation articles: a flow that helps a specific function in our team.
Part of our team responsibilities is to triage, track and update submissions to a quality catalogue that we maintain for our platform(s). Since we're a large organisation, keeping track of all of these can be very time-consuming. This flow automates the bulk of this, allowing the coordinators to focus on communicating with the teams rather than trawling through data.
- The flow is triggered daily, set to run daily at 7:25 AM. This means its available before the coordinators start work.
- It retrieves items from a SharePoint list based on a filter that checks if the "Modified" date is less than 14 days ago. This is our requirement: that teams update this list every 2 weeks.
- For each retrieved item, it creates an HTML table.
- The HTML tables are stored in an array variable, and it builds the table as it goes.
- The HTML tables are then joined together and formatted to remove unnecessary characters. This housekeeping is a requirement since Power Automate treats HTML as a string and needs the '<' type characters replacing with '<'.
- The formatted HTML tables are composed and posted in a Teams chat with our coordinators advising them which teams need reminding to fill in the catalogue.
