Update to using Microsoft Flow for approval of site pages

In May of last year I wrote a post which showed how you could implement approval of modern pages in SharePoint using Flow. That post was written before the edit experience implemented the Submit for approval button.

While the built-in approval is nice, Flow approval provides easy to use actionable messages which makes approving that much easier – no need for the approver to visit the page library to actually approve the item.

In my previous post I added a step to check for the Pending status of the page before invoking a Flow approval action in order skip the Draft and Approved states which should be ignored for the Flow itself. This means Flow will trigger more than actually needed – but that was the way to go last year.

Seems the SharePoint triggers have now been updated to support trigger filters, which means the steps can be optimized a bit.

Click the ellipses (…) on the trigger and pick Settings.

In the trigger conditions settings add the following to trigger only for items which are awaiting approval.

@equals(triggerBody()['{ModerationStatus}'],'Pending')

In order to use the content approve action you still need to get the correct ETag, which means the Get file metadata action has to stay.

A simple auto-approve Flow would look like below.

Happy Flowing!

Gotcha in Microsoft Flow when modifying properties on a newly created file

This one is a common task, something I've set up a quadrillion times with workflows and event receivers in SharePoint over the past decade or so. And now the time has come to using Microsoft Flow.

The scenario is that when a file is created, you have a piece of business logic which should set metadata on the file. It could be a status flag, a serial number - the business cases are many and diverse.

Read on, young apprentice (you know who you are :) )

Disable Event Firing when Flow updates a SharePoint list item

There’s a lengthy discussion over at https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Flow-Ideas/Disable-Event-Firing-when-Flow-updates-a-SharePoint-list-item/idc-p/271110 to have a Flow trigger on a SharePoint item being modified, and then be able to update that same item in the workflow without causing it to re-trigger, causing a possible infinite loop.

The workaround posted so far is to check on a specific field if you are to update the item or not. This causes Flow to fire twice per item, one for the actual update, and one where it skips the update based on some status logic.

Melissa Hubbard has a post on the workaround solution over at THE INFINITE LOOP: WHAT IT IS AND HOW TO AVOID IT.

[Update]
It is also possible to use the ValidateUpdateListItem REST API as well, but you need to ensure you get the dates formatted correctly. I could not make it work for Norwegian locale, but once setting the locale to English I got it working. Examine the output of the action after a test run to see if dates had issues or not.

A big thank you to John Liu for pointing this out, as I missed the trick of setting the date when testing this API when researching this post.

http://johnliu.net/blog/2019/2/flowninja-hack-78-modifying-modified-by-and-modified-time-with-microsoft-flow

As an update to the JSON payload used in John's post, set bNewDocumentUpdate to true, if you don't want to add a new version to the item you are updating (kind of counter-intuitive).

[Original Post]

The underlying issue causing this behavior is that any update to a SharePoint item will trigger an update event for the list. EXCEPT if you use a method called SystemUpdate, which is only available via the JSOM/CSOM/Native SharePoint API’s, and not the REST API.

This quickly becomes very technical, but until the SharePoint Flow connectors support the ability to update using a System Update, this is what we have to deal with. It is certainly possible to overcome this issue, but it involves a bit of XML which might throw you off. If not, read on.

Gotcha in Microsoft Flow when handling SharePoint list item attachments

I’ve written a couple of these, where I in PowerApps allow the user to upload attachments to a list item. This feature can typically be used to upload documents or photos from the end user.

While list attachments work fine they are often easier managed in a separate document library, or perhaps you want to perform some other action on them. And this is where Flow comes into the picture. When the item is saved in SharePoint associate a Flow which triggers on new items in the list.

What is important to note is that when list items with attachments are created, the item is first created, and then each attachment will be a subsequent operation. When this action is performed using a phone or tablet the attachment upload might take some time, and Flow might very well trigger before all the attachments are done uploading - the effect being that Flow will miss some of the attachments, and your business process can miss some important data.

How to properly use the “Get Manager” Flow action with a SharePoint list

Photo by Olu Eletu at Unsplash.

This is a short one and quite easy. When you create an item in SharePoint the unique identifier for a person field is the claim, while the Get Manager action takes a UPN (user prinipcal name).

For Office 365 they are almost equal. The claim is actually the UPN + a claim prefix.

UPN: john@contoso.com
Claim: i:0#.f|membership|john@contoso.com

If you have a flow triggering on a SharePoint list, you would enter the following expression for the UPN field to strip off the prefix from the claim.

replace(triggerBody()?['Editor']?['Claims'],'i:0#.f|membership|','')

Sure you can use the e-mail address which usually match the UPN, but you would be surprised how often multiple accounts have the same e-mail address - admin accounts, test accounts etc. So using a unique identifier is always a better approach compared to the e-mail address.

Tip for making a Flow easier to read and author

This tip is if you have one logical path in your flow, and also have an “if” statement somewhere. If you are running if/else branches of actions, it won’t help you much.

The following flow has two conditions. If something A, then tweet, and if also something B, tweet some more.

I however find it quickly messy to write a lot of steps inside the “Yes” branches. Instead you can author the same flow with and empty “Yes” branch, and terminate in each “No” branch.

If you then rename your conditions to something useful and collapse them, the flow is much easier to read and author in my opinion.

Using Flow to promote better document sharing and collaboration in your organization

During lunch today I mentioned a customer sending me a document attachment in an e-mail, instead of what clearly should have been a sharing link to the file.

Outlook has excellent capabilities for sending sharing links instead of attachments, and especially internally in organization this should be the preferred approach to avoid e-mail bloat and multiple versions of the truth. Forcing people to change is not easy, but the conversation let to the following Flow urging your colleagues to do the right thing :)

Blocking vs. non-blocking Flows

Microsoft Flow has many triggers and one of the most useful ones is the HTTP request trigger, where an external party can call a specified endpoint with a message which will trigger the workflow. Basically this feature has two modes, one where the workflow executes logic and returns the outcome and the other where it does not need to return the outcome.

If you have an application which is translating text and you want the text back to the application you can create a Flow similar to the one below. A request which takes a string as input, the text is then translated to Norwegian, and returned at the end.

When running a REST query against the Flow URL using for example PowerShell we get the expected result back.

> $json = '{"thetext":"This is a test"}'
> Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -Uri $uri -Body $json -ContentType "application/json"
dette er en test

This above operation is a blocking one. If you however want the translated text to be sent out as an e-mail, you remove the Response action and add an e-mail action.

When you now call the Flow URL you will immediately get a 200 success back, while the workflow executes the steps you have added. A non-blocking workflow.

Summary

If you want to use Microsoft Flow as an API in your application with input and output you can include both a Request and Response step. The calling application will then wait until a response is returned (or it times out). If you however want to use Microsoft Flow to execute an fire and forget action, omit the Response step, and the workflow will start executing while your calling application immediately can continue, regardless of what happens in the workflow.

Saving a collection of images from PowerApps to SharePoint using Microsoft Flow

Download the sample Flow and PowerApp

Yesterday I wrote about how you can save an image from PowerApps to a SharePoint library using Microsoft Flow – after reading about Paul Culmsee’s approach using Azure Functions. Paul challenged me to save a whole collection of images, and not only one image, so here goes!

This solution loops the images in Flow, but you could easily have looped them in PowerApps as well, saving one image at a time upon submit.

I’ll start with the Flow, and this time we’ll use one input only. And this is where it get’s a bit nasty. A Flow can only accept strings as input from PowerApps, not a collection of items. To overcome this, I’m concatenating the data into one string in the PowerApp, and then splitting the data in the Flow.

The data being passed in looks like this:

Monday, May 15, 2017LT.jpg|data:image/jpeg;base64,<data>#
Monday, May 15, 2017AB.jpg|data:image/jpeg;base64,<data>#

First is the filename with a readable date (borrowed code from Paul), next a pipe | to separate the filename from the base64 encoded image. And at the end a hash # to separate each image from each other.

In Microsoft flow create a new Flow named “Save Images”

Add a “PowerApps” step, followed by a “Compose” step.



In the input field for the “Compose” step pick “Ask in PowerApps”. Next change the formula to:

"@split(triggerBody()['Compose_Inputs'], '#')"

and rename the compose action to “Split images” for readability. This will split the incoming string on the character #, creating an array with one item per image.

Note: Remember to include the double quotes around the formula.



Below the “Split Images” action, add a “Filter array” action. This action is used to remove the empty element we get at the end when creating the data string in PowerApps. Use the Output from the previous action as the “From” field, click “Edit in advanced mode” and use the following formula to remove empty values. item() will yield one item in an array.

@not(equals(item(), ''))

Note: No quotes here :)



Below the Filter array action, add a for each item loop, so that we can process each image sent over.



Pick the Body output from the Filter array step as the input in the for each.



In the for each action, add two compose steps. Rename one to “Filename” and the other to “File content”.

For filename add the expression:
"@split(item(),'|')[0]"

For file content add the expression:
"@base64ToBinary(replace(split(item(),'|')[1],'data:image/jpeg;base64,',''))"
"@dataUriToBinary(split(item(),'|')[1])"

The effect is that for each item, split on the character |, and assign the left side as the filename, and base64 decode the right side of the split.
Note: Remember to include the double quotes around the formulas.


The last part is adding an action step to create a file in SharePoint. Pick a site and library, and assign the values from the previous compose steps.

Setting up the PowerApp

For the purpose of this demo I have four controls on in my app. A camera control, a button to send it all to flow, a clear button and a gallery to see the images taken, and which will be sent over to SharePoint.

To grab an image I have the following formula on the OnSelect property of the camera control:

Collect(PictureColl,Camera1.Photo)

This stores each image in a collection named PictureColl.

The gallery control’s “Items” property it bound to the PictureColl collection.

The “OnSelect” property of the submit button contains the following formula:

ForAll(PictureColl,Collect(SubmitData, { filename: Concatenate(Text( Now(), DateTimeFormat.LongDate ),Mid("0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRTSTIUVWXYZ", 1 + RoundDown(Rand() * 36, 0), 1),Mid("0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRTSTIUVWXYZ", 1 + RoundDown(Rand() * 36, 0), 1),".jpg"), filebody: Url }));

SaveImages.Run(Concat(SubmitData, filename & "|" & filebody & "#"))

The formula creates random filenames with dates and assigns the filename and image date to a collection named SubmitData (borrowed from Paul’s post). Then the file data is concatenated using a pipe | between the filename and the file contents, and concatenated using a hash # between each image. This is then passed into the SaveImages flow I have added to the PowerApp.

If you run the PowerApp (except in the Windows desktop version), tap the camera a couple of times to grab images, and then hit the submit data, you should end up with some images in your library.



See my previous post about on how to add a Flow to the PowerApp using PowerApps studio.

Custom hyperlink icon column using Flow

Laura Rogers (@wonderlaura) writes awesome end-user SharePoint posts, and recently wrote one which caught my eye – “Custom hyperlink icon column”. The write-up explains how you can add a custom column to a SharePoint list which shows an icon with the use of SharePoint workflows. This got me thinking if this is doable using Flow instead…. and it is :)

I suggest you read Laura’s post first, then go ahead with this one.



Note: This only works for SharePoint lists at the moment using Flow, not document libraries

For my scenario I will cover how to add a custom edit icon to a list – which in a modern list view takes you to edit mode in one click instead of two. Wooo!