SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

More Microsoft Flow action here in this post, this time building a Risk to Issue escalator for Office 365 Project Online. In project management risks sometimes unfortunately turn into issues. When this event occurs it’s useful to be able to copy over some useful information from the risk item and automatically create that issue item with some of the risk data. In this blog post I will show you a simple solution to do this using a combination of Microsoft Flow, Project Online, SharePoint and a tiny bit of JavaScript.

Firstly let’s take a quick look an example risks list on my test Project Online PWA site:

This is pretty standard apart from two new columns Escalate? and EscalatedDate. The Escalate? column is used to tag the risks that need escalating and the EscalatedDate column is used to hold the date when the risk was escalated to an issue. The issues list in this example is just standard out of the box. On the Risks page I also have a button labelled “Escalate Risks” this is used to create an item on a central risk to issue escalation tracker list on the root PWA SharePoint site. There is a simple bit of JavaScript code behind the button as seen below:

This JavaScript file is added to a central library in PWA and added to the Project Sites on the Risks Allitems view page using a content editor web part. The code gets the project site title, Project GUID and Project Site URL from the associated Project Site then creates a list item on the central Project Risk to Issue Escalation Tracker list:

This simple example JavaScript code always creates items on the central list but in production you would only create the items if there were risks to escalate. EscalationDate defaults to today’s date, Completed defaults to No and the CountOfRisksEscalated is blank by default. The process of adding the escalation item here has two purposes, one to track the history of what risks are escalated so this can be reported on but also trigger the Microsoft Flow to carry out the escalation. The Microsoft Flow can be seen below:

The Flow trigger and actions are detailed below:

The Flow is trigger when an item is created in the Project Risk to Issue Escalation Tracker list then a SharePoint Get Items action is used. The ProjectSiteUrl property from the trigger action is used to dynamically set the correct site address. This action gets items from the risks list on the correct project site where the risks are tagged for escalation and have not yet been escalated.

Then an Apply to each action is used and the result from the Get Items action is passed in:

Inside the apply to action there is a SharePoint HTTP action to create the issue item using a REST call. Inside the body, JSON defines how to create the new item. For the issue columns in here, the values from the risks fields are used, this is where you can update this to map other risk columns to issue columns, the expression for the risk data is similar to this items(‘Apply_to_each’)[‘Category’][‘value’] for lookup columns or this for default text fields items(‘Apply_to_each’)[‘Description’]

Then another SharePoint HTTP action is used to update the risk item via REST:

The current risk ID is passed in to the Uri (items(‘Apply_to_each’)[‘Id’]). The only column updated is the EscalatedDate column on the risk list with the date the risk was escalated.

The final action in this Flow is a SharePoint Update Item action to update the SharePoint item on the central Project Risk to Issue Escalation Tracker list:

The item Id and ProjectName are passed in from the Trigger data but these values have not changed. The Completed column is set to Yes and the CountOfRisksEscalated is set using the length expression to count the number of items in the array from the first action: length(body(‘Get_items’)?[‘value’])

That’s it, a simple low / no code configurable solution starter for Risk to Issue escalation in Office 365 Project Online. A video of this solution starter in action can be seen here: https://youtu.be/IgKxDuu1sng