Automation

Are you using PowerShell and Microsoft Planner? I feel it doesn’t get the love it deserves, and to be honest, I hadn’t used PowerShell with Planner in a while, but wanted to get back into it. I first starting using the Microsoft.Graph.Planner and found some limitations that were possible if you used the Graph API directly. One of the things that stood out was you couldn’t call a Plan or Bucket by its real name, only by its ID. Yes, I could have added some logic to make it so, but realized that it also couldn’t remove recurring tasks. I thought it was going to be a quick fix, but found out hours later that wasn’t the case.. hence this post!

Let’s get into the process now.

First, we are going to go to planner.microsoft.cloud and click on the task you want or click on the plan, then on the task you want.

Once you are there you will find the ID in the URL

Below you will see in bold the “TaskId.” The “PlanId” is right after ‘plan/’. They will always be in these locations.

<https://planner.cloud.microsoft/webui/plan/1L__9CleiAwPwqMXDEPEALPQKPa9/view/board/task/1Peq3A7__1EXqot27RoV53QYBZuS?tid=26my427d-m317-83y1-63r0-4suv1pe421y8>

Next we will create a $TaskId variable, where you will put the TaskId inside of it

$TaskId = "1Peq3A7__1EXqot27RoV53QYBZuS"

Before we go farther, lets connect to Microsoft Graph (beta) with these scopes

Connect-MgGraph -Scopes 'Tasks.ReadWrite','Group.ReadWrite.All'

Then you’ll want to get the Task information and save it to the $Task variable to use later. This is important as this will store the ETAG value that you will need to delete the task, as this value changes anytime something changes with that task.

$task = Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Uri "<https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/planner/tasks/$taskId>"

Now here is the fun part, there is no way as of right now to delete a recurring meeting in one call. The best way I found to do it is to first cancel the recurrence then delete it. After doing more research I found later on that it does say you have to ‘$null’ out “Schedule” from Microsoft Learn. I figured it out the hard way when I was using “Developer Tools” to see the API requests it was doing on each click.

Let’s cancel the recurrence, first we have to build out the body to null out schedule and we do that like below.

$body = @{
    recurrence = @{
        schedule = $null
    }
} | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 3

After the body, we create the the “Header” for the request. We do that by below. This is very important because if you don’t Graph won’t know the exact task you are trying to change.

$headers = @{ 
    "If-Match" = $task.'@odata.etag'
    "Content-Type" = "application/json"
}

Now that we have TaskID, Body, and Header we can update(PATCH) the recurring task to a non recurring task.

Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Method PATCH -Uri "<https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/planner/tasks/$taskId>" -Body $body -Headers $headers

Perfect, you have canceled the recurring task and can now delete it. This may seem repetitive, but as of right now it’s the only way to do it. You have to get the task information again because it will now have a new ETAG, and will fail if you try to use the previous one.

$task = Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Uri "<https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/planner/tasks/$taskId>"

And we will have to put the updated ETAG in the header

$headers = @{ 
    "If-Match" = $task.'@odata.etag'
    "Content-Type" = "application/json"
}

We could have done this part in the beginning, but didn’t want to throw too much at you in the beginning, but here we will create the URI as a variable to make the API request shorter and easier to read.

$Uri = "<https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/planner/tasks/$taskId”>

The moment is finally here, where we actually get to delete the task…

Invoke-MgGraphRequest -uri $Uri -Method Delete -Headers $Headers

That’s it! Now go back to planner and confirm that is has been deleted.

Congrats on deleting your first recurring task! Below, I’ve put the whole script so you can see it all together and you can update the TaskId then run it to to delete recurring tasks.

If you’re interested in learning more about Planner and PowerShell, stay tuned as I may have some ideas to make using them together even easier.

$taskId = "1Peq3A7__1EXqot27RoV53QYBZuS"

$task = Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Uri "<https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/planner/tasks/$taskId>"

# Cancel the recurrence by setting schedule to null
$body = @{
    recurrence = @{
        schedule = $null
    }
} | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 3

$headers = @{ 
    "If-Match" = $task.'@odata.etag'
    "Content-Type" = "application/json"
}

Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Method PATCH -Uri "<https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/planner/tasks/$taskId>" -Body $body -Headers $headers

$task = Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Uri "<https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/planner/tasks/$taskId>"

$headers = @{ 
    "If-Match" = $task.'@odata.etag'
    "Content-Type" = "application/json"
}

$Uri = "<https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/planner/tasks/$taskId”>

Invoke-MgGraphRequest -uri $uri -Method Delete -Headers $headers

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback, have a great day!