Attaching Links to All Received Attachments to an Email

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I am involved in developing a workflow automation using Power Automate. The requirements is as follows,

Whenever an email with specific subject with attachments is arrived, these attachments need to be uploaded to SharePoint. Then an approval will start containing links to these uploaded attachments. By going through similar questions and blog posts, I was able to come up with following solution.

This is a great solution. However my requirement is not satisfied due to the Apply to each mechanism. This flow will start an approval relative to the number of attachments. Let's say email is received with 2 attachments, this flow will start 2 approvals. Each approval flow mail will contain only one link to an attachment (to that corresponding attachment).

This is perfectly understandable according to the Apply to each logic.

I don't want this to happen. I wan't my approval mail to contain links to all of the received attachments. Let's say email received 2 attachments, only one approval mail need to be send with links to all 2 attachments. Can it be achieved through Power Automate?  

Something like following might satisfy my requirement. Email attachments need to be uploaded to SharePoint and their corresponding links should stored in an array list or something. Then an approval mail will be sent with links based on that array list. Any help would be highly appreciated.

Thanks.

[Pstork1]

Just take the Approval logic out of the apply to each and build a list of the links that you want by appending them to a string using the Approval markdown language.  Then when the loop exits create your Approval using the variable you created in the loop as the body of the approval.

[tom_riha]

Hello @Anonymous ,

as already said, move the 'Start and wait for an approval' action out of the 'Apply to each'. Inside the 'Apply to each' you need only to prepare all the files into a string variable ('Append to string variable' action) which you can later input into the task.

The approval task doesn't allow you to enter multiple links into the 'Item link' field, so you'll need to put all the link into the 'Details' field using the markdown language: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/approvals-markdown-support. The relevant information for you is the format for building links:

[Link Text](Link URL)

The only problem with this is if your file name contains brackets, then it will not process the files and their links correctly, it'll display both as a string.

Or you can add the documents as attachments to the task, instead of string variable you'll use array variable, in the 'Apply to each' you'll use 'Append to array variable' with the format below and then enter the variable into the task attachments.

{
  "Name": <fileNamePlaceholder>,
  "ContentBytes": <fileContentPlaceholder>
}

[Anonymous]

Hi @tom_riha ,

Thanks for the help. But, it is throwing following error.

The request failed. Error code: 'InvalidRequestContent'. Error Message: 'The request content was invalid and could not be deserialized: 'Could not find member 'ContentBytes' on object of type 'ApprovalsConnectorAttachment'. Path 'attachments[0].ContentBytes', line 1, position 187.'.'.

 My flow is like below. 

I am converting the content as below,

base64ToBinary(items('Apply_to_each')?['ContentBytes'])

because this conversion is required to proper content upload of the file. Am I doing any mistake here?

[tom_riha]

Hello @Anonymous ,

I'm sorry I gave you wrong format, "ContentBytes" is used when you want to send the attachments in an email. In approval task it's just "content".

{
  "Name": <fileNamePlaceholder>,
  "content": <fileContentPlaceholder>
}

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Thank you very much @tom_riha . It solved my problem. I thought of attaching the documents to the task instead of uploading them to SharePoint and then sharing their corresponding links.

By the way, is above format (JSON like format) defined in Microsoft documentations or anywhere? I would love to learn more about this kind of techniques. 

[tom_riha]

Hello @Anonymous ,

I guess it'll be in some documentation, but I didn't search for it so I can't give you a direct link. Google will be more helpful than I in this case. 🙂

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

If anyone came across similar requirements, this is how I achieved it.

Method 1

As pointed out by @tom_riha , only one link can be inserted in Item link field of the Approval activity. If we have more than one links, we can only insert them in the Details field.

So what I did was, I initialized a string variable (say mailContent). Then by iterating through Apply_to_each activity, I appended SharePoint links to that string based on markdown format for links.

[link](link URL)

Then finally I inserted this mailContent variable in Details field of the Approval activity.

This gave me a task approval mail like below,

Method 2

Add the contents of the file to an array variable. Refer above solution. Then set this array variable in Attachments field of the approval activity (Sometimes you might want to click that small button with T logo with description Switch to input entire array).