Disable Microsoft Forms via Power Automate

It is technically possible to disable a Microsoft Form from Power Automate. Why would you want to do this? Maybe it’s time limited – ok sure you can specify an end date via the existing UI. But what if that date or time was to be dynamic?

What if you wanted to turn off the form based on the number of submissions? My use case is based on users signing up to an event. We have 10 spaces, an 11th users tries to sign up. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could automatically disable the form on the 10th user and then notify the 11th that unfortunately we’ve reached capacity? Or depending on use case, maybe that 11th user will see that the form is now closed and they are too late.

What I am going to share with you is unsupported. I have previously demonstrated how you can download the data from forms direct from the API back in August of last year (2021). You can watch that here.

Shutting down a Microsoft Form

If you have built a form and navigate to the elipses and settings, you can untick the box to Accept Responses and set a message. We are going to automate this in one single action within Power Automate.

The API endpoint consists of a tenant id, group or user id and a form id. If you are looking to read up on the specifics, I suggest you watch my video or read up on Hiro’s blog post here

Below is the body that you must submit in order to update the closed status to true or indeed false if you want to re-enable your form. You can also set the form closed message. I have made this dynamic to indicate when the form was closed. This is displayed to the end user.

{
  "settings":
    "{
      \"FormClosed\":true,
      \"FormClosedMessage\":\"We have reached capacity - @{formatDateTime(utcnow(),'dd/MM/yyyy HH:MM:ss')}\"
    }"
}

The single action

We simply send a PATCH to the forms api, with basic header information and the json output (per above). In order to do this we need to update the tenant, group/user id and forms id based on the Uri in the screenshot below.

/formapi/api/16c901d1-9763-49b1-961c-6cd701f5d0f7/users/6c646262-4f6f-4bfb-88c7-86b3d1252cac/forms('0QHJFmOXsUmWHGzXAfXQ92JiZGxvT_tLiMeGs9ElLKxUNEtSR05HNjNMNlZDMERZTEMzREc5SDFZWi4u')

How would you implement this?

This is all down to your specific use case. It’s possible to return the number of rows on a form submission and based on that number you could implement a condition. Similarly, if you are adding users to an event, you could count the number of attendees for that event. Maybe you could even delete the event from the form instead of disabling the form? I think that’s a challenge for another day.

What do you think? Is there a need for this functionality natively? Let me know in the comments below and if you are looking to add users to an outlook event, why not read this post?