How to: Send tables with links to items in Power Automate Flow emails

Use Case

Recently, a client requested a daily digest email be sent to their support staff with a list of their active tickets, along with a link to the particular record. This blog will take you step-by-step through the usefulness of this Flow and how I created it.

What’s great about this Flow is, even though in my example I am triggering it as a recurrence with CDS as a data source, you can use any type of trigger you may need or any data source that applies. The important—and more difficult—part is including the links directly to records in an email table. 

Challenges

You might think this would be a simple request, but it turns out that you need to do a little bit of thinking to make this work. My first instinct was to try to store the returned values for each user as an Array Variable, but when you use the “Create HTML Table” action based upon the array, the link reference does not get recognized as HTML and you get an email that looks something like below:

Ticket Table Issues

How to Create this Flow (or something similar)

  1. Create the Flow with a Trigger of Recurrence. Set the recurrence pattern to whatever you would like. We are setting a daily recurrence in this example.
  2. Initialize an integer variable for the count of records returned. We don’t want to send users emails with blank tables.
  3. Initialize a string variable for storing each new row of the table.
    Flow Ticket Variables
  4. List All Active Users 
    List All Active Users
  5. Apply to each user
  6. List tickets
    List Tickets
  7. Apply to each ticket
  8. Increment count variable
  9. Condition: If count is greater than 0
  10. Get account (to display the client’s name)
    Apply to each ticket
  11. Append to string variable for a new table row. This is how we are building the HTML for the email.
    Append to String
  12. Condition: Count is greater than 0
  13. Send an email from a Shared Mailbox. Formatting the rest of our HTML will happen in the body of this email action. Insert whatever table formatting you may want into the <style> tag. Keep in mind, in my screenshot the web version of outlook strips some of the formatting.
    Email Body HTML
  14. Set count to 0
  15. Set ticket table string to null

With any luck, your results should appear like this:

Email Table Example

Author: Bernie Thibeault

What I love most about Dynamics 365 is how it streamlines processes for businesses of all sizes. Every organization is unique, but they all have the same need to get more done in less time. Dynamics 365 is the solution to do that. I'm a skilled listener who knows how to get beneath the surface and hone in on exactly what clients need to get out of Dynamics 365, making him one of the most valuable additions to any team.