EmployeeExperience.Communities.PostAsync does not return any response

[afowler1]

What's the goal?

Create a Viva Engage Community with the EmployeeExperience.Communities.PostAsync method and retrieve the ID of the group.

How is it failing?

Using the below code, I can see that I successfully created the group (via checking the VivaEngage GUI) but the method returns null, so I am unable to tell within the codebase if the group was successfully created and what ID it was assigned.

var requestBody = new Community
{
    DisplayName = "Financial Advice for Software Engineers2",
    Description = "A community where financial advisors who represent customers from software engineering profession can discuss advice and suggestions for there clients.",
    Privacy = CommunityPrivacy.Public,
    AdditionalData = new Dictionary<string, object>
    {
        {
            "[email protected]" , new List<string>
            {
                "https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/users/7df7eeaf-1d8f-45ac-8abd-2c45dfb11c28",
            }
        },
    },
};

var result = await graphClient.EmployeeExperience.Communities.PostAsync(requestBody);

Checking the Viva Engage GUI, I can see that the group is created and I am the owner but the method still returns null.
I think it may be noteworthy that the method returns a Microsoft.Graph.Beta.Models.Community but the documentation suggests that we would receive a http response indicating a success response.

Below is a screenshot during a breakpoint.

Used for testing:

latest Graph Beta SDK from Nuget (v5.60.0-preview)
Windows 11
.NET 6

[timward60]

The community creation API is asynchronous so it requires some additional work, not sure if there is a better way, but in the meantime you can try this:

First create the community, this will start a long running operation that creates the community asynchronously.

    var community = new Community
    {
      DisplayName = displayName,
      Description = description,
      Privacy = CommunityPrivacy.Public
    };

    var nativeResponseHandler = new NativeResponseHandler();
    await _graphServiceClient.EmployeeExperience.Communities.PostAsync(community, requestConfiguration => requestConfiguration.Options.Add(new ResponseHandlerOption() { ResponseHandler = nativeResponseHandler }));
    using var responseMessage = nativeResponseHandler.Value as HttpResponseMessage;
    if (responseMessage == null || responseMessage?.StatusCode != System.Net.HttpStatusCode.Accepted)
    {
      throw new Exception($"Failed to create community. Status code: {responseMessage?.StatusCode}");
    }

Now that the operation is started we can retrieve it's id from the Location header:

    // Not sure if there is a better way to pass a resource URL to the client.
    // For now just parse the operation id from the URL.
    var location = responseMessage?.Headers.Location!.ToString();
    var startPos = location.IndexOf("('") + "('".Length;
    var length = location.IndexOf("')") - startPos;
    var operationId = location.Substring(startPos, length);

We can now poll the long running operation to wait for the community creation to complete:

    // Now we need to poll the long running operation for status updates.
    string? communityId = null;
    var retryCount = 0;
    while (communityId == null && retryCount <= 5)
    {
      retryCount++;
      await Task.Delay(5000);

      var operation = await _graphServiceClient.EmployeeExperience.EngagementAsyncOperations[operationId].GetAsync();
      if (operation == null)
      {
        continue;
      }

      if (operation.Status.Value == LongRunningOperationStatus.Failed)
      {
        throw new Exception($"Failed to create community: {operation.StatusDetail}");
      }

      if (operation.Status.Value == LongRunningOperationStatus.Succeeded)
      {
        communityId = operation.ResourceId;
        break;
      }
    }

Once it completes successfully, we can get the community:

    if (communityId == null)
    {
      throw new Exception($"Failed to create community. Operation timed out.");
    }

    // Now we have the community id, we can fetch the created community.
    return await _graphServiceClient.EmployeeExperience.Communities[communityId].GetAsync();

[andrueastman]

Thanks for the response @timward60

As the documentation higlights, the API response is a 202 response code with no body hence why the returned value is null by the sdk.
We'll close this issue for now as the work for a long operation handler is tracked via microsoftgraph/msgraph-sdk-design#83