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tomh
Resolver I
Resolver I

Flow Retriggering upon Modify File

Hello All!

Please help!

I have a flow that launches a workflow approval to mark a file approved or mark it rejected and move it upon 'When a file is created or modified" in a SharePoint library. The flow is retriggering upon every Modification of the file. Approver has gotten like 75 approval requests for a single file.  This is not good. 

 

Is there a way to make a condition that restricts the flow from triggering after initial trigger? The flow only needs to trigger once or only if the Approval Status column changes from Approve.

 

Thanks all!

 

Tom

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Accepted Solutions
v-litu-msft
Community Support
Community Support

Hi @tomh,

 

There is a post could help you, you could use the Send HTTP request to SharePoint to get the previous version of file to check the approval column status whether is "Pending" or others, then compare it with current version, if current version is "Approve", it means this update changes the "Pending" to "Approve". If they met this condition, do next steps, such as send email:

http://johnliu.net/blog/2018/5/microsoft-flow-sharepoint-trigger-on-specific-fields-changed-via-sp-h...

 

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

View solution in original post

11 REPLIES 11
tomh
Resolver I
Resolver I

Simply set 'Concurrency' to 1 in first step of flow via 'Settings'.

Done.

@tomh  Doesn't that only restrict the triggers from running in parallel? When you reduce the concurrency down to 1 it will just queue up subsequent triggers. 

@Taylor_Becktold 

Yes, that is true and they queue at the time of modification of the file so will continue to sequentially process. 

 

My bad...know of any way to stop the flow from triggering? Need it to trigger just once upon the first edit or placement of the file into the directory.

 

Thanks!

 

 

@ChristianAbata 

Christian, would you possibly have any insight into this Trigger Condition or any other way I can restrict my flow from triggering more than one time?

 

Thanks man

 

@tomh 

 

It might be beneficial to create a column that you update when a Flow has been run and does not need to be run again. You can then utilize Flow's pre-trigger conditions to prevent the Flow from triggering again.

 

Here is a great video of Flow's pre-trigger conditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcTMBQ9KuUA

 

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v-litu-msft
Community Support
Community Support

Hi @tomh,

 

There is a post could help you, you could use the Send HTTP request to SharePoint to get the previous version of file to check the approval column status whether is "Pending" or others, then compare it with current version, if current version is "Approve", it means this update changes the "Pending" to "Approve". If they met this condition, do next steps, such as send email:

http://johnliu.net/blog/2018/5/microsoft-flow-sharepoint-trigger-on-specific-fields-changed-via-sp-h...

 

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

@v-litu-msft 

thank you for this. I will need to look into this. On another topic...I am exploring the option of limiting 'concurrency' to 1 flow in addition to setting retry policy on the 'update file' properties to fixed interval of 90/PT30M. My hope is that this will slow down the triggering of flows and the fact that users are in the excel documents for the better part of the day. Thus when a user is in the excel file it is 'locked' and thus cannot be updated in the Approval Column to either 'Approve' or 'Reject'. So the retry policy insures that the file is updated at some point upon the first approval email.

 

My questions is: Since Concurrency is set to 1 and if users are in the files editing,(trigger=when a file is modified or created) there becomes a list of 'Waiting' flows. My question is, the 'waiting' flows, are they simply not started and in que to start when the previous is finished? or have they processed through the second step of 'Get file properties'? I need to know this because if they are simply waiting in que to be executed then they will most likely cancel out as I have a condition that looks for 'Approve' in the 'Approval Status' metadata and flow will terminate if = Approve.

 

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.


Thank you!

 

Tom

 

@v-litu-msft 

Hello, I am receiving a 400 error on the 'Update File properties' step. Since the file is locked for editing, the flow is failing. However, I have placed a retry policy to the 'Update Properties' command per last response above however, it appears the flow is not retrying to Update Properties after the first attempt and thus failing.  Any reason why you think this is happening? Doesn't a 400 error fall within what qualifies for a retry?

 

Thanks!

 

Tom

Hi @tomh

 

Once the trigger fired, Flow is started. Such as your trigger is When a file is modified or created, once a file is modified, it will trigger the Flow. As Flow executed Get file properties action, it wouldn't wait for the previous run finish, it will check the file whether available or not, if not, it will report the error such as 400. And 400 error will not retry.

So, for your status, you could insert Check Out and Check In into Flows, before update file, check file out, finished edit file, check-in.

There are some method about locked Excel file, hope it could help you something:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-file-is-locked-for-editing-by-another-user-6fa93887-2...

 

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

@v-litu-msft 

Hello! You have been incredibly helpful and I thank you for that. One last question if you don't mind and we can call this resolved...

 

In a Send Email command, I would like to format the 'Folder Path' as a hyperlink from the email a user receives...is their a way to do this?

 

Thank you so much!

 

Tom

 

Hi @tomh,

 

Use this action Create Sharing link for a file or folder, you could create a link for the folder. When you send email, you could use the link directly:

Annotation 2020-06-11 153528.jpg

 

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

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