Set the task priority in Microsoft Planner using Power Automate

For quite a while I’ve been looking to set the task priority in Microsoft Planner when using Power Automate. The preview version of the Create a task actions can do this.

Create a task action

The Create a task action now has two versions, and the preview version allows you to set the priority to a value from 0 to 10.

That needs a bit of a zoom in. Due to the ridiculous datamodel used by the categories all the different categories take up a lot of the space. But I will leave that problem for another post on a different day.

Set the task priority in Microsoft Planner

All the way at the bottom there is the Priority field. From the tip in the edit box we can see that we are expected to supply a value between 0 and 10. I hear you say: “What?? 0 – 10”?

Indeed Planner only has 4 priorities. So why can we set this Priority field to 10 values?

To find out what is going on I create a flow and created a task for each priority

So I quite quickly found out that Priority 0 is Medium, 1 is Urgent. 2, 3 and 4 are important. And then for Priority 1, 6,7,8 and 10 there seems to be a bit of a confusion as the icon for Urgent is used while the priority may not be set to Urgent.

Looking at the create a task (preview) documentation I found quite quickly that the same as I initially discovered. And apparently 0 is Urgent, but I actually found that 0 is Medium.

However this doesn’t mention the alert being switched on. That alert settings seems to be a bit randomly spread across the different options anyway.

And looking at the beta version of the Graph API, I didn’t get any more information.

Priority	Priority in Planner	Comments
0	Medium
1	Urgent
2	Important
3	Important
4	Important
5	Medium
6	Medium	But the Urgent icon is used
7	Medium	But the Urgent icon is used
8	Low	But the Urgent icon is used
9	Low
10	Low	But the Urgent icon is used

As things are slightly confusing, I would probably only use the priority values for 1, 3, 5 and 9.

Retrieving the priority in Power Automate

Well that is not there yet, unless …

The reason why the Create a task action is in preview is because the Planner action uses the Beta version of the Graph API.

So I went over to the graph explorer and got to the details and I found the priority of my tasks .

All I had to do is use the following graph api end point:

https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/planner/tasks/7Pkry5zpnEq11gL20sWtvpcALMwf

So now we could get to the priority of the task using an http request action to collect the priority of all the tasks.

I remember quite a while back I asked for Planner’s priority to be made available in my post about Exporting Planner to Excel using Power Automate. It now looks like this feature is available. At least in the preview version of MS Graph.