Out-of-Office Reviewer Removal

Overview

FlowLibs - Out-of-Office Reviewer Removal is a scheduled Power Automate Cloud Flow that automatically re-routes GitHub code review assignments whenever a primary reviewer has an active Outlook out-of-office (automatic reply) message. Every morning at 09:00 UTC, the flow reads a SharePoint list that maps primary reviewers to backup reviewers, checks each primary reviewer's Outlook mailbox for an active auto-reply, and — if the reviewer is OOO — removes them as the requested reviewer on all their open pull requests and requests a review from the pre-configured backup reviewer in their place.

Use Case

Engineering teams pay a tax every time a reviewer goes on vacation: the PRs assigned to them sit untouched in the review queue until somebody manually reassigns the work. This flow eliminates that manual intervention by treating Outlook's automatic-reply status as the source of truth for reviewer availability and pairing it with a static backup mapping that each reviewer pre-registers in SharePoint.

The flow is ideal for teams that:

• Engineering teams using GitHub PR reviews and Outlook automatic-reply for OOO.
• Teams that pre-register a backup reviewer per primary reviewer in SharePoint.
• Want PR throughput preserved during holiday and conference periods.
• Need an audit log of reassignments emailed to an IT admin daily.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

SharePoint list schema

Create OOOReviewerMapping with Title, PrimaryReviewerEmail/Login/Name, BackupReviewerEmail/Login/Name, IsActive (1/0).

Change the schedule

Edit the Recurrence trigger. frequency=Hour, interval=4 gives 4-hour polling for faster reassignment during peak PR hours.

Filter to specific repos

Modify the SearchIssues q to include repo:org/repo-a repo:org/repo-b or team-review-requested:@org/team-name.

Expand to Microsoft Teams

Replace the backup notification action with shared_teams/PostMessageToChannel to ping an on-call channel.

Multi-level fallback

Add a TertiaryReviewer* column set and chain a second MailTips check inside the If branch.

Suppress self-OOO

Filter out PRs whose author equals the primary reviewer login so authors don't lose their own review on their own PRs.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

greater(length(coalesce(body('Get_MailTips_For_Reviewer')?['value']?[0]?['automaticReplies']?['message'], '')), 0)

concat('is:pr is:open review-requested:', items('Apply_to_each_Reviewer')?['PrimaryReviewerLogin'], ' user:', variables('varGitHubOrgOrUser'))

last(split(items('Apply_to_each_Pending_PR')?['repository_url'], '/'))

if(equals(variables('varReassignmentLog'), ''), '<li><i>No out-of-office reviewers detected. No action taken.</i></li>', variables('varReassignmentLog'))