Microsoft Flow – Calculate next month – Resolved with workaround

One of the known issues in Microsoft Flow is to calculate next month’s date. When you use the DateTime connector quite often flow gives you a date that is roughly right. In this post I’m giving a number of steps that can calculate next month’s date.

I’m starting with a Compose step to get the current date and time with the utcNow function. This step of course isn’t really needed. But it makes it easier to explain the solution.

Then in my second step I will convert the flow to the GMT  time zone. The GMT zone is my local time zone. So you might have to chnage this to your local time zone.

convertFromUtc(outputs('Compose_-_Current_Date_and_Time'),'GMT Standard Time','yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mmZ')

Then I’ll calculate the current day of the month.

convertFromUtc(utcNow(),'GMT Standard Time','dd')

Then I’ll add a month to my utcTime that I collected earlier.

Rather than using the above easy to use broken action you could also use the following function:

addToTime(outputs('Compose_-_Current_Date_and_Time'),1,'Month','yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mmZ')

and finally I replace the wrong day with the correct day.

replace(body('add_to_time'),substring(body('add_to_time'),7,4),concat('-',outputs('Compose_-_Current_Day'),'T'))

Note: Rather than using outputs in the above you could also simply use:

replace(body('add_to_time'),substring(body('add_to_time'),7,4),concat('-',convertFromUtc(utcNow(),'GMT Standard Time','dd'),'T'))

Now I’ve got the following flow that calculates next month.

After I’ve optimized my flow a bit by removing the first Compose I’m now  ( at 2018-07-21 15:35 ) getting my next month’s date.

And we could event take this further and use just 1 Compose:

replace(
addToTime(
convertFromUtc(utcNow(),'GMT Standard Time','yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mmZ')
,1,'Month','yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mmZ')
,substring(
addToTime(
convertFromUtc(utcNow(),'GMT Standard Time','yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mmZ')
,1,'Month','yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mmZ')
,7,4),concat('-',convertFromUtc(utcNow(),'GMT Standard Time','dd'),'T'))