Sharing a file submitted through MS Forms

[MarkDouglas]

Hi PA People,

I'm trying to make a flow which is:

• triggered by submission to a Microsoft form
• Creates a sharable link from each submitted file in one of the 'file upload' questions. (The form is in my OneDrive for Business account, so the files go into my personal ODfB storage)
• Sends an email containing those links to a user

The first and last parts are straight-forward, but I'm stuck getting the sharable links.  I am using a Parse JSON action to interpret the question response and looping through each file found.  This gets me the name, link (not yet sharable), id, referenceId, driveId for each file.  That part runs A-OK.

How do I take that information and get a sharable link?  There are "Share a file" type actions in the 'SharePoint' and the 'OneDrive for Business' connectors.  As I am using OneDrive for Business, I would have thought to use that connector with the file's link as the File Path:

But I get an error code 400: Bad Request.  I've tried a few different arrangements of this without success.  I read many posts here, several blogs and finally resorted to asking the AI.  If I ask Co-pilot (and ChatGPT) they say I should be using SharePoint's "Create Sharing link for a file or folder" action.  I figured that since the back-end of OneDrive is SharePoint, and the URL of the files in question are stored in "*companyname*-my.sharepoint.com/personal/" it could be worth a try. 

For that to work I'd need the Site Address, Library Name, File Path/ID etc.  Some of that I can probably generate from what I have, but all of the variations I tried just came back as "file not found" when getting the metadata.

I can't tell if I'm just structuring my requests incorrectly or if I'm using the wrong connector.

So my question boils down to:

1. Should I be using the SharePoint or ODfB connector?
2. What should the input data look like for the action/actions?

Thank you for your time!

[MarkDouglas · Accepted solution]

I was able to figure this out eventually.  For anyone else in the same situation:

The connector to use is OneDrive for Business.  The action to use is "Create Share Link".

The process is:

• Trigger ( When a new response is submitted )
• Initialise a variable of Type: Array. (To store the URLs we're going to add to the email body)
• Get response details
• Condition: My file upload question was optional on my form, so I put a condition here to ensure files were actually submitted, otherwise the parser will fail on an empty response.
  • Parse JSON.  Turn the text response into an array of objects.  The input is the response to the uploader question on your form.  The schema represents the format/structure of the data.  The schema I used to give me access to the name, id and link properties is down below.
  • Apply to each - Using the output from the Parse JSON step
    • Create share link - from the OneDrive for Business connector.  For the 'File' input, pass in the 'id' from the Parse JSON step.  Settings here for scope and read/edit access.  Make sure the connector is using the same account as where the form lives.
    • Append to array variable -  The array we made earlier <- As I wanted this to make a list in my email, I appended the following script, using the 'Web URL' from the Create Share Link action, and the 'name' from the Parse JSON action:
      

Schema for Parse JSON:

{
    "type": "array",
    "items": {
        "type": "object",
        "properties": {
            "name": {
                "type": "string"
            },
            "link": {
                "type": "string"
            },
            "id": {
                "type": "string"
            }
        }
    }
}

And that was it.  I then had an array that I could slot in to email body text where needed using a basic join() formula.  This probably seems pretty simple to most of you, but I hope it helps someone!

[pushkargondane]

Thanks a lot. The detailed explanation was very helpful and solved a long standing problem.

The issue in our code was we were sending the link instead of the id when creating the shared links