Updating Sharepoint pages (HTML) with Flow

[hazymat]

Currently I'm embedding a Word doc into a Sharepoint page. This doc is used by school staff to show them what's happening on a given day. (It sounds like a shared calendar might be better, but this sheet has many non-calendar information as well. The system needs a re-think, but that's for later.)

These documents are pre-created months ahead, one for each day.

The problem

Currently I'm getting the embed code from the Word online doc and pasting into the Sharepoint HTML.

This needs to be done each day. I don't actually work full time for this school. It's a small school and nobody onsite can do this.

Possible Solutions

1/ Create a Flow attached to the Sharepoint document library, which copies a selected item to a new file called "current-day.docx" and then embed that instead. This works fine, but it requires the document editors to press this button, then press the "run flow" button in the sidebar - every time the document is updated.

This is not suitable, as the doc is updated continuously throughout the day by multiple people. It's statistically likely that some of the users will forget, and this will causes issues.

2/ Get users to just load the document directly from the Document Library.

This isn't suitable because I'm working with a staff room display screen in kiosk mode. Nobody is responsible for making this work on a daily basis - it just needs to work.

3/ Other random ideas: create an additional column in the Sharepoint Library called "is current day". Use flow to get a list of documents that have this checkbox set, then *somehow* get the IDs of such documents, and update another List Item. Then in the Sharepoint page, embed a file, *somehow* referring to that list item which has the document ID, and form the URL accordingly. That's convoluted, but if it works, I don't care.

Best Option - how can I make it work though?

4/ I don't mind asking for one member of staff to use a Document Library Flow to "make this document live" (as opposed to "make this version live", as per #1, which is definitely unsuitable). They would only have to do this once per day. Is there a way to then update the HTML of a Sharepoint page from Flow?

Even if it requires some javacsript on the Sharepoint page. Or whatever it takes, quick and dirty suits me, but it just needs to work until we design a better solution.

Any ideas how to do this?

[v-xida-msft]

Hi @hazymat,

Could you please share a screenshot of your flow's configuration?

How do you embed a Word doc into the HTML file?

Further, do you want to update the Word doc within the HTML file every day?

I think your third thought is available, you could consider take a try to add a Yes/No type column (Is current day) within your SharePoint library, if the Word file needs to be used for current day, set the corresponding Yes/No type column to Yes.

You could create a flow on your side, use the Recurrence trigger as the trigger of your flow, then get all files from your SP library using the "Get files (Properties only)" action of SharePoint connector, add a "Filter array" action to filter files, find the specific file whose Yes/No type column (Is current day) is set to Yes. After that, generate a URL for the file, then type the Dynamic file URL into your HTML file (embed file into HTML file based on file URL).

If you could provide more details about your scenario, we would provide a proper workaround for you.

Best regards,

Kris

[hazymat · Accepted solution]

Thanks Kris for your response

In the end I did a modified version of my possible solution #1, with some additional automation which meant that the person in charge of publishing the day sheet only had to press a button once per day, and the rest automatically updated.

For anyone interested, here's what I did:

• Created a flow that can be triggered from the toolbar in Sharepoint Document Library. User can select a document, then click Flow > Set Today's Daysheet (that's the name of my flow)
• This copies the *path* of the selected file to a list item (I set up a dedicated list to hold this item).
• Then there's a second flow that copies the file pointed to by this list item to another location e.g. /Daysheets/Current-Day-Sheet.docx - overwriting the previously copied one. This flow runs every 5 minutes. Yes there's always a slight delay, but it's not mission critical that the school's display screen shows information that is less than 5 minutes up to date
• Then I embedded the Word doc into the Sharepoint page. There are a few ways to do this, as far as I can make out: you can either use Content Editor or Page Viewer web part, or you can pull the embed code out of the Word Online document and paste that (iframe) directly into the Sharepoint page's HTML. I chose the latter, as this allowed me to style it more exactly, also made it "view only" rather than allowing users to live update the document from the page. This was preferable. Finally, I added a script editor web part to the same page, and used some javascript to refresh the iframe every 2 minutes, so staff in the staff room can see the most up-to-date version.