Looking for solution to copy SP calendar item columns to new item created when a editing an item within a recurring series

Question

I have a SharePoint office calendar where employees input their work schedules using recurring series. When they have a planned day out of the office, they edit the day item (not the series) for that day to indicate they are out of the office. When doing so, a new single day item is created. All items are created with the Title being a concatenation of the Created By name and a Status taken from a choice field selected from when the calendar items are created or edited. My workflow also grabs the user's department and manager using the user profile service. All this is done with minimal user input so as to simplify the process for my user community. Using that information the calendar views can be filtered by department. Here is my problem...I have managers that need to edit an employee's single day item when the employee is out sick which will create a new single day item. Some of those managers do not share the same department name. Therefore when those items are created they pick up the attributes from the managers who created them and display in the wrong calendar view. I need a solution to pull the existing created by name (employee) when editing an existing day into the new day item. I have tried several approaches using workflow variables but I can get anything to work.

Any help is appreciated, Thanks.

Answer 1

How does your workflow "grab the user's department and manager using the user profile service."? Via Modified By column? Why not use Created By instead?

For example:

Answer 2

Solved: The problem was in that I was hiding fields on the edit form. I wanted to keep my new form and edit form as clean and easy as possible for the user, so I hid the department and manager fields in the list event properties. I also did this to prevent users from changing the field data, accidentally or otherwise. Although I was pulling in the department and manager information and it was being displayed in the list columns, it wasn't being displayed on the edit form itself. I am theorizing that the workflow saw the fields as blank because they weren't being displayed on the form.