Fetching Word documents attached to Microsoft Forms responses

[MarkDouglas]

Hi All,

I have an incident reporting form made in MS Forms, and have attached a Power Automate Flow to collect the responses and add them to a list for our WHS Officer's admin use.  The form allows attachments and the flow collects those too.

The issue I'm having is that when the attachment is a Word document (presumably any kind of recognised Office document) the link comes through pointing to the Word Online app with the document path as a query string.  This causes the 'Get File Content by Path' step of my flow to fail on Word docs.  Unrecognised types such as PDF or JPG work just fine.

Looking through the rest of the response detail body there doesn't seem to be any other ways to identify the file.  It provides an 'id' and a 'referenceId' but neither of those are what's required for a 'Get File Content' or 'Get File Properties' step.  I tried a hacky assembling the path by typing the server local path and adding the response 'name' (filename) but it still gives a 404.  What am I missing?

Thanks!

[SudeepGhatakNZ]

@MarkDouglas ,

Please see if this helps

How to send Microsoft Forms file uploads from multiple questions to an Approval workflow using Power...

[MarkDouglas]

I appreciate the reply, thank you.  I've read through the article, but I don't believe it covers the issue I'm having.  I might not have explained it clearly enough.

My form is stored in SharePoint online.  When the flow requests the file location of a Word document, SharePoint provides the file link as pointing to Office Web Apps with the file path as a query string:

https://(mySP).sharepoint.com/sites/(mySPSite)/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc=(path to file)

This confuses the 'Get file Content by Path' step and it fails for that type of file.

I was hoping there's a way to request the file without OWA or some other way I can identify the file at the file content step.

[SudeepGhatakNZ]

I see. Can you not parse the value of the file path if that url is well defined?

Probably using split function with = as the delimiter?

[MarkDouglas]

While I may yet resort to this, surely this can't be the intended way to handle something so common as copying file attachments?  It feels like I'm missing something obvious.  The file is in the same SharePoint site, I have an 'id' and a 'referenceId', why would I need to snip parts out of a string to identify the file?

I've been in IT for decades but Power Automate makes me feel like a total novice 😄  Just let me code it and I'll have it done in seconds!

[SudeepGhatakNZ]

Ha ha, I can feel for you!

Let me try it out at my end. You are correct what I suggested is a hack, not a proper solution, and it shouldn't require all that string manipulation.

[MarkDouglas · Accepted solution]

I seem to have solved the issue, though not quite in the way I'd have wanted!

I ended up going back to specifying the path to the file manually and adding the filename as an expression.  It's not ideal, but it works.  I'm not happy about it!

Appreciate you helping out, it was very useful to run through some other ideas.  Thanks again!