Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hi there,

I want to copy a complete Planner bucket with 11 tasks with a Power Automate Flow. Within the single tasks there is a list of several bullet points.

I finally made it to copy the the first task, but when I use "Update task details" the bullet points of the task are all mixed up and are displayed in the wrong order. I cannot find a reason for this und cannot find a way to fix the order.

Can you please help me what I did wrong?

Thanks in advance and kind regards.

My Flow: Create a bucket --> Get a task --> Get task details --> Create a task --> For each "Update task details"

Categories:

Building flows

Hey @Janine147

Your logic is fine, this is how Planner checklists work.

A checklist isn't an ordered array. Each item carries an orderHint string and Planner sorts on that, not on array position. Hints are compared character by character from the start until the ordinal values differ; if one string ends first, the shorter sorts before the longer.
microsoft

So: Update task details doesn't let you set orderHint, the service assigns it. Add items one at a time in an Apply to each and the loop's parallel branches commit in random order.

Quick fix

Apply to each → Settings → Concurrency Control → On → Degree of Parallelism = 1. Default is 20 parallel, and that alone explains most scrambled checklists.
Better: don't loop the update. Build the full checklist array with a Select, then make one Update task details call per task.

Deterministic fix , set the hints yourself via Send an HTTP request (HTTP with Microsoft Entra ID):

PATCH https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/planner/tasks/{taskId}/details
If-Match: <etag from the GET>

{ "checklist": {
    "<guid1>": { "@odata.type": "microsoft.graph.plannerChecklistItem",
                 "title": "First",  "isChecked": false, "orderHint": " !" },
    "<guid2>": { "...", "orderHint": " ! !" },
    "<guid3>": { "...", "orderHint": " ! ! !" }
}}

The format is <previous hint> <next hint>! space between, ! on the end, empty string where an item is absent. Both empty gives " !"; chaining gives " ! !", " ! ! !", which sort in that order. Keys via guid(). Put the etag in the header field in the designer, not code view, code view escapes the quotes and Graph rejects it.

Check first: are these checklist items or bullets typed into the Description? If it's the description, order shouldn't scramble and something else is wrong.

References:

Using order hints in Planner

Use the Planner REST API (etag / If-Match rules)

Tom Riha — Update Planner checklist with Power Automate flow (covers the etag escaping issue)