Modifying Created By on SharePoint List with Power Automate

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I have a flow connecting a Microsoft Form to a SharePoint List.  Now every time a form is submitted (trigger) and the flow runs, I end up being the creator of the request under "Created By" on SharePoint, as I am the creator of the flow. What I need is the "Created By" field to be updated with the Form Submitter's name/account instead of mine. This would allow me to enable Item-Level Permissions on SharePoint and every Form Submitter would only be able to see or edit his/her own record on the list.

I found the link below while searching, but as I'm not a developer, could anyone explain the steps to me, and if this would work?
If not is there an alternative solution?

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

Thank you!

[v-bacao-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

The article you mentioned is the best method to achieve your requirement:

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

If you want to update Created by, you just need to change Editor to Author.

Please take a try and feel free to let us know if you have any questions.

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Thank you @v-bacao-msft, I will give it a shot.

But what is the input in "Compose User"? What do the different parts represent (Key, i:0#.f, membership,etc.)? Should I only change the email portion and put my email account there? Should I add any step before such as Parse JSON?

Your support is really appreciated!

[v-bacao-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Please take a try first. Yes, you just need to replace the email address. It seems that we need to add Parse JSON action.

Feel free to let us know if you have any questions when you configuring the Flow.

Best Regards,

[sudharsan1985]

@Anonymous 

As @v-bacao-msft mentioned just the change the value from 'Editor' to 'Author'. Just put the value as 'i:0#.f|membership|<userloginname>'. Only the userloginname has to be changed dynamically, the first part is same. Mostly in SharePoint online, user loginname and email are same. Try it out and let us know if you have any clarifications.

Hope it helps, please like it or mark it as a solution if it resolves ur clarification or issue
-Sudharsan K...

[Anonymous]

@sudharsan1985 @v-bacao-msft Thank you for your responses!

I ran the flow, but it failed at the "Send an HTTP request to SharePoint" action item as per below.

Should I change the URI? I tried in another run to replace the list with my list name, but I still got the error at the item level. If you could help me understand the URI components and what I should change there (what to replace by) it would be awesome.

In addition to double check, is the string expression in the Compose action item (on this link: http://johnliu.net/blog/2019/2/flowninja-hack-78-modifying-modified-by-and-modified-time-with-micros...)

or CreatedBy below supposed to include the previous output, i.e. : string(outputs('Compose_User'))?

Further, as I would like to replace the CreatedBy by the "responder" from the Form, I don't see a step where I am getting that value to be sent to the SharePoint List. It seems to me that the value is being replaced by a static value; the user/email in the Compose output, no?

Your help and support are really appreciated!

[v-bacao-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Please enter your own list name in the Uri instead of NewItemList. NewItemList is a reference provided by the author of the article.

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

@v-bacao-msft Thank you for your response.

I was able to make it dynamic by parsing the Form's body, and entering the following expression in a Compose data operation:

body('Get_response_details')?['responder']

I already replaced NewListItem with my own List Name but I am still getting this error (400) as depicted below.

Am I doing anything wrong?

[v-bacao-msft]

Item Id also is a reference, please fill an existing item Id here instead of 1.

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

@v-bacao-msft Thank you, but it seems I still have an issue somewhere.

I ran a few more tests, and I changed the items(1) to items(7) which will correspond to that item, but I still got the following error:

{
"status": 400,
"message": "Not well formatted JSON stream.\r\nclientRequestId: 220c7b8d-e201-489a-b375-197e8802a4d7\r\nserviceRequestId: 24d44a9f-4017-a000-99bf-dee3b5f801b0",
"source":
"errors": [
"-1",
"Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.InvalidClientQueryException"
]
}

Now assuming we get this to work, how can we make this Item ID dynamic anyway? I will need it to automatically get the ID corresponding to the new item being added to the list.

[Anonymous]

@v-bacao-msft @sudharsan1985 I resolved the items number issue by linking it to a dynamic ID as per below.

However, I still get the "Not well formatted JSON stream" error message.

Any ideas?

Thank you!

[Anonymous]

@v-bacao-msft @sudharsan1985 I tried to create a flow to test the process on provided link (http://johnliu.net/blog/2019/2/flowninja-hack-78-modifying-modified-by-and-modified-time-with-micros...) and followed the same steps, but still got that same error message ""Not well formatted JSON stream".

Could you try it at your end and see if you can get it to work?

There must be something wrong either with the steps/JSON code used in the article or something I'm doing.

Thank you!

[ChristianAbata]

hi @Anonymous  please replace your 3rd Compose action with this.

[{"FieldName":"Author","FieldValue":@{string(outputs('Compose_User'))}]

[Anonymous]

@ChristianAbata Thank you!

However, I still got the same error even after changing that...

Did you try it? Did it work for you?

[ChristianAbata · Accepted solution]

yes @Anonymous  please see this is what you need to add a valid json

{
    "formValues": [
        {
            "FieldName": "Author",
            "FieldValue": [
                {
                    "Key": "i:0#.f|membership|@{outputs('GetResponder')}"
                }
            ]
        }
    ],
    "bNewDocumentUpdate": false
}

see the error was you had this

[{"FieldName":"Author","FieldValue":@{string(outputs('Compose_User'))}"}]

and the correct line is

[{"FieldName":"Author","FieldValue":@{string(outputs('Compose_User'))}]

[Anonymous]

@ChristianAbata @v-bacao-msft @sudharsan1985 

Thanks a lot! It worked, I had to change the 3rd Compose to:

[{"FieldName":"Author","FieldValue":"@{string(outputs('Compose_User'))}"}]

[ChristianAbata]

@Anonymous  you are welcome, please consider to mark my answer as solution. 😉

[Nova13055]

I am getting below error while performing the same steps:
A node of type 'StartArray' was read from the JSON reader when trying to read a value of a property; however, a 'PrimitiveValue' or 'StartObject' node was expected.
clientRequestId: 359a5020-a0ad-4489-be56-db68ea651c5e
serviceRequestId: cd976f9f-60b5-2000-b5a0-8a03f0f95d15

It is not accepting an array type in Fieldvalue.

[Nova13055]

The issue got resolved. I was not stringifying the "Fieldvalue" parameter before passing it to request JSON body. 

[bradleyhorton]

Has anyone managed to do this in a document library rather than a list?