Get SharePoint Document ID from Word email attachment

[Anonymous]

I am trying to automate the "Publish a major version" of documents stored in a SharePoint document library whenever one of those documents is emailed outside of our organisation - or received back into our organisation.

Ultimately what I want to happen is to provide our users with the ability to cc: a shared mailbox when they send (or receive) one of these Word documents, and Microsoft Flow will take the document, find the original document in the library, upload it as a new version of that file, and then "publish a major version" of the document - with the check-in comments set to the content of the email that was exchanged.

This all seems eminently possible except that I cannot figure out how to get the Document ID property out of the attachment in the email - I can extract the attachment itself, but getting the Word document properties seems impossible - and maybe it is, but it shouldn't be.

Does anybody have any suggestions to extract this number in a usable format within Microsoft Flow?

Each of these documents has a unique document ID assigned by SharePoint, which is stored in the Document Properties in Microsoft Word like this:

O-1234-5678

Where:

"O-" is just an arbitrary reference

"1234" is a reference to the document library in which the document is stored

"5678" is the ID of the document within that document library.

Since we are only (for the most part) dealing with a single document library, the only thing that matters is the "5678" that is relatively easily extractable from the Word document properties - if they were available to be extracted once the email attachment was pulled out from the email.

[v-yamao-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Is there a file in the sharepoint library that is the same as the attachment of the email?

If yes, you could refer to screenshot below to create the flow:

The condition is to compare the “file name with extension” from the Get files action with “Attachment Name” from the trigger.

And the flow would run successfully to get the ID as below:

Best regards,

Mabel

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your suggestions - I think I follow your logic - but unless I'm wrong it assumes that:

1. The filename is unique across the library - we have > 10,000 files in this library, nested several levels deep, inside multiple folders + document sets.  There will inevitably be filename clashes.
2. The filename stays the same - one of the issues I have is people taking documents out of SharePoint onto local hard drives, saving them locally, renaming them, then sending them externally.  When this happens, the filename will change but the document ID would be preserved (unless it is uploaded into another SharePoint site where it is overridden).  Likewise, when the external parties send the documents back, they are likely to rename them - so they will no longer be found in the library.  I am explicitly trying to overcome this issue, so being able to ignore the filename and rely on the Document ID - which is for this express purpose of finding a document irrespective of the filename / path - should be available to a Flow.

In the absence of any other solution at the moment I might try it out and see if it works (for me at least, who doesn't change the filename) - but as a complete solution to what I'm trying to achieve, it won't work across everyone else.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

I have figured my own solution this problem:

1. Create a completely separate site collection from the main site, and enable Document IDs (allow >1hr for Document IDs to take effect).
2. Create a temporary document library in which to store the files, verify that Document ID appears as a column (add it to the default view).
3. Turn OFF the "Assign Document IDs" setting on the site collection (this will stop the site overwriting the Document ID on the documents stored in the library, and is why we need a completely separate site collection - it can't be done on the original site collection as it's a collection-wide setting).
4. Use the SharePoint "Create File" action to store the files in that document library, followed by a "Get File Properties" action to retrieve the Document ID from the file in its temporary location.  This will be the original Document ID, since it wasn't overwritten by the new site collection.

This works a treat.

[gauravtempe]

• Flow error when copying files from one SharePoint location to another:
  "Failed to verify the existence of source object at '*' due to error 'The system cannot find the file specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070002)"
• Solution:
  Make sure document id feature is enabled
• How to enable:
  https://sharepointmaven.com/how-to-track-documents-in-sharepoint-using-document-id-feature/