A workaround for current limitations of flow actions in SharePioint.

[paulculmsee]

As many of you know, currently Flow has limitations with SharePoint integration that makes many common real-world scenarios difficult to achieve, including: 

• The Create File action provides no way to update library metadata when uploading a file, nor does it return the item ID of the newly created file
• The Create Item action provides access to metadata but only works on lists
• The Update Item action works on document libraries, but requires the item ID of the document to do so. Since Create File does not provide it, we have no reference to the newly created file
• The Get Items function allows you to search a list/library for content, but cannot match on File Name

Basically this means it's hard to upload a file to SharePoint via flow and then set metadata on it. 

Given this is such a common scenario, I came up with this workaround. This method is not ideal, but will work without a problem for many scenarios. Basically the method is:

1. Use Create File action to upload a file
2. Use the Get Items action to bring me back the metadata for the most recently created file in the library
3. Grab the ID from step 2
4. Use the Update Item action to set the metadata on the recently uploaded image.

I fully document the approach here as part of a series of posts that shows how to call an API in PowerApps and pass the data back to Flow...

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2017/07/07/hows-the-weather-using-a-public-api-with-powerapps-part-...

Hope this helps someone, and hopefully the need for such a method is eliminated sooner rather than later...

Paul

[v-micsh-msft]

Hi @paulculmsee,

Thanks for the sharing.

For Flow related blog, you may also consider posting in the following site:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Flow-Community-Blog/bg-p/FlowBlog

Regards,

Michael

[paulculmsee]

I'd be happy to post to that blog, but I can't see how? Am I msising something obvious?

[v-micsh-msft]

Hi @paulculmsee,

Follow the blog below:

Introducing the Microsoft Flow Community Blog

Quoted:

"

Everyone is welcome to contribute! To get started, simply message me, @JessicaC, with a rough title for your post and a couple of sentences to describe your topic, or a link if you want to excerpt a post that already exists on your own blog. Together we’ll preview how your post will look once it’s done, and set a publication date.

"

Regards,

Michael

[paulculmsee · Accepted solution]

Actually I just found a much better way to do it that has helped me go bulk photo uploads from PowerApps with tagging to SharePoint 🙂

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2017/07/14/the-currently-best-way-to-update-sharepoint-document-met...

The gist of it is that the web service used by the Get Items action is different to the styandard SharePoint REST endpoint and certain things don't work... The filter to apply to the list is:

FileLeafRef eq '[File name from previous flow action]'

Paul