Over the years, some updates to Flow have been better than others, and others, not so much. If memory serves, the send an email action would use dynamic hyperlinks without much work, but something went sideways with one of the updates causing dynamic hyperlinks not to work as you’d want.
Here is a basic example of including a hyperlink in an outgoing email; further down the page, I’ll provide a more realistitc example.
In this example, I setup the Flow to trigger when an item is added to a SharePoint library. The key thing to note in this example is the value of the varHyerplink variable; note the double quotes around the link to item.
Using the SharePoint HTTP flow action to update a person or group field, I kept getting this error:
A 'PrimitiveValue' node with non-null value was found when trying to read the value of a navigation property; however, a 'StartArray' node, a 'StartObject' node, or a 'PrimitiveValue' node with null value was expected.
The field I was attempting to update is named Submitted By, with an internal name of Submitted_x0020_By. Each time I tried to update the field I was seeing the error noted above. It wasn’t until I looked at one of my previous flow runs did I notice what the issue was. It turns out, that the field name I should be using is Submitted_x0020_ById.
I was in the middle of streamlining an old flow and needed to compare two dates and times. To simplify things, I opted to use the Convert time zone flow action, but it gave me an error that seemed a little odd.
Unable to process template language expressions for action ‘Convert_time_zone’ at line ‘0’ and column ‘0’: ‘The template language function ‘convert timezone’ expects its fourth parameter to be a string that contains a date time format. The provided value is of type ‘Null’. Please see https://aka.ms/logicexpressions#ConvertTimeZone for usage details.’.
Notice that I did not select an option for the Format string field, this is required, but there’s not a red * next to the field.
Select an option for that field, and the universe will be back in alignment.
Below are all the steps required to add your company holidays to your Outlook calendar. This is a simple approach that can easily be updated to pull the holidays and dates from other data sources like Exel, SharePoint, Dataverse…
Overview of the flow that will be created:
All of the holidays (events) will be stored in an array using a compose action.
After that, a parse JSON event will be used to make the events available in the apply to each action. Note: after the parse JSON action is added to the flow, click the generate from sample button and paste in the holidays JSON from the step above.
Next, add an apply to each action to the flow. In the action, the output box will hold the body of the parse JSON action.
The convert time zone action is used to standardize the date format. For the base time use the Date field from the parse JSON action.
The last item that needs to be added is the outlook create event action. Note: for the End time property a formula is used: addDays(body(‘Convert_time_zone’),1)
Unable to process template language expressions for action 'Apply_to_each_sftp_file' at line '1' and column '30517': 'The template language expression 'body('List_files_in_folder')?['body']' cannot be evaluated because property 'body' cannot be selected. Array elements can only be selected using an integer index. Please see https://aka.ms/logicexpressions for usage details.'.
From one day to the next one of my flows stopped working with the error above. The flow is super simple: Get files from an SFTP folder Loop through the files Copy file to another location Delete file
Looking at the apply to each step I noticed body element was referenced. This might have been related to how I set up the loop or the autogenerated action.
Action the flow was unhappy with: Updated the flow and it started working: Note how the ?[‘body’] element is missing from the second picture.
Fix? Created a new Apply to each loop by first setting a variable to the name of the file I’m looping on, then added my other actions. There might be a better way to fix this, but for now, this is what works.
Using Flow to get or check for files in a large SharePoint library can be a little tricky. If you are sure your library will always stay under 5,000 items the Get Files (properties only) Flow action is a quick n’ simple approach to use. When your library crosses over the mythical 5k mark or somewhere in that neighborhood, the Get Files action will fail to return results without warning. What I’m outlining below are other options when working with large libraries.
Setup:
Option 1: Get Files using an Odata filter query downside: only use this in small libraries
Result:
Option 2: use the SharePoint API downside: the lack of transparency from Microsoft related to how often data is crawled.
Result:
Option 3: use the SharePoint API along with a filter action on the library. This option does require that you have metadata set up on the library to filter on and there is not a wildcard / contains option. The filtered value needs to be exact. downside: you will need to set up your metadata ahead of time or create it after the fact then backfill.
Result:
The more I learn about Flow and SharePoint Online, the more I’m starting to like Option 3 when doing a lookup type of search. SharePoint Search is an extremely powerful tool if the search index is fresh.
Scenario: Each day I have a couple of Azure Runbooks export SharePoint list items and upload them to a SharePoint library. If one of the Runbooks fails, I needed to send an email alert that something went wrong.
Basic logic: If files created today in SharePoint <> X, send an email.
The easy solution would have been to loop through the files, check their created date, increment a variable, then make a condition statement.
More-better way: Run flow daily at 6:00 PM Send an HTTP request to SharePoint to get files Parse the response Condition statement — if true, send an email
I was trying to dynamically set a SharePoint list item ID to a variable but the variable was not displaying in the Dynamic Content menu.
The solution was to use an expression to set the value, save the flow, exit the edit screen, then re-enter the edit screen.
variables('varRefID')
Create a variableNotice the variable is not available for selectionUse the expression window to enter the variable nameThe variable has been added but looks weird. This is not an issue but continue reading if you want to clean display value.Save your flow and exit the edit screen.Edit your flowThe variable is now displayed correctly!
