Forum Discussion
Updating specific List Column value with Flow?
ikoalosaurus Yes, that's doable, but why would you want to do that? Why spam someone with dozens of emails about people starting or ending their shifts?? How will the receiver of these emails get an overview of the big picture?
Wouldn't it make more sense to give that receiver of the emails a view where they can see who is currently on shift and who is not? That would be just a list view that they can pull up at any time, and they don't have to find and interpret the two dozen emails they have been sent from a workflow during the day.
Also, if you set the default view of the list to be filtered so people can only see the items where the <shift person> column equals [Me], they can just pull up the list, see their own record and edit it. That will greatly reduce the probability of Mark accidentally editing the item for Jane. You can also turn on versioning, so each and every item change can be traced back to who made the change.
You can create a site page for supervisors. This page can have a list view that shows all items, grouped or sorted by who is on shift. Set the permissions for this page so only a certain group of people can access it. That way, your regular Jane Bloggs will not easily be able to look at other people's shifts. It's not fool proof, but it requires quite a bit of SharePoint knowledge to unravel and expose,
Dear Ingeborg , thank you for the fast reply.
The only problem with the latter option is that, currently all the entries in the list (100 entries for 100 people) are created by myself, which means, they cannot edit their own entries unless i set the permissions so. If the entries were created all by themselves, they would be able to edit only their own entry (with their name). But, it's ok, i can live with that, i will give the permissions on the list so that everyoone can edit all items, assuming, they will edit only their own entry : )
So, the idea is :
Mark comes online at 8:00 in the morning, opens the list, finds his name in the list, and changes value of "Available Now" column from no to yes. An email is sent to the XY person saying "Mark has started the shift.
Later during the day, John starts the shift at 11:00 let's say, and the flow is the same.
Then, when Mark ends the shift at 16:00, he changes the value from no to yes and another email is sent saying "Mark has ended the shift".
Is that doable? : )
If that works, instead of yes/no column i could create multiple choice column with choices: yes, no, break, so that we include the break as well.
Cheers Ingeborg : )
ikoalosaurus Yes, that's doable, but why would you want to do that? Why spam someone with dozens of emails about people starting or ending their shifts?? How will the receiver of these emails get an overview of the big picture?
Wouldn't it make more sense to give that receiver of the emails a view where they can see who is currently on shift and who is not? That would be just a list view that they can pull up at any time, and they don't have to find and interpret the two dozen emails they have been sent from a workflow during the day.
Also, if you set the default view of the list to be filtered so people can only see the items where the <shift person> column equals [Me], they can just pull up the list, see their own record and edit it. That will greatly reduce the probability of Mark accidentally editing the item for Jane. You can also turn on versioning, so each and every item change can be traced back to who made the change.
You can create a site page for supervisors. This page can have a list view that shows all items, grouped or sorted by who is on shift. Set the permissions for this page so only a certain group of people can access it. That way, your regular Jane Bloggs will not easily be able to look at other people's shifts. It's not fool proof, but it requires quite a bit of SharePoint knowledge to unravel and expose,
Ideally i would create a flow which can register that the field was changed to no or yes by a specific person, and then i can decide what the action will be, whether sending the email or some other action, but what i struggle with is actually how to do the first part of the flow :/
Let me elaborate : )
This is a team of freelancers, meaning, people are not sitting in an office, there are people all around the world, working in different time zones, and most people have never seen each other, the idea is to have a public list where everybody can see if the person is actually working today. Because, even though there are defined working hours of every person, sometimes people just call the day off and other people are not aware if that person is present or not, except the manager of course.
For the whole team, it's very useful if we can all see who's actually present on that day and who's not.
I agree that the email notifications might not be the best notification system out there, but we need something which is using sharepoint and flow out of the box meaning no customizations, that can notify our whole team who's present , who's not. I was thinking, yeah we are not going to check those email on daily basis, but if we are looking for someone and for example they're away, we might check the inbox if that person actually started the shift (clicked on yes early in the morning).
So yeah, no supervisors, no filtered views, it should one default view for the list, visible by everyone, where we can actually see whether the person was online on that day.
Is there no way for the list to keep read permission level, and to somehow explicitly share each list item with the person so that they can edit it only that item, and no other items, keeping in mind that all list items are created by myself? I tried to share item with a person granting them edit access, they get the new option to edit the item, but once they change the value, the page "you don't have access" loads.
Let's pick this apart.
If this is an international team, then everyone would benefit from one place where they can see all the information at a glance. - Use a SharePoint list view that shows who's currently in and who is not in.
Can we assume that people want to work together and not sabotage each other? If versioning is turned on, there is an audit trail that shows exactly when a change was made, and by whom. If people mess around with records they should not change, well, that would be a career limiting move, no? Therefore, giving everyone edit access should not be a problem.
If this still is a problem, why don't you create a totally new list that has just one field for In/Out and let everyone have edit access to that list?
This really does not need a complicated flow.
Yesterday i asked all my people to create the entry for themselves. They did it. So right now, i have all the items in the list, created by the right people, and the current scenario is that each person can edit only their own item, meaning no changes on other people's items can be done.
Thank you Damien. Since i resolved the issue of people potentially changing someone else's item, what steps can i skip from your proposed workflow?
Now i need only this logic:
If Person XYZ changed the XYZ Column value to Yes in the List XYZ - an email is sent (or any other action).
Same for No.