Approvals attachment not opening

[aarijsiddiqui]

Hello,

I am trying to send an approval at the end of my flow with an image attachment.

In my flow I start with a http request trigger where I am receiving a base64 encoded image in the request. Later I attach this image in my "start and wait for an approval" action. The approval does get sent and attachment is also there but it is not opening. When I view the source and extract the attachment then I need to decode from base64 the attachment twice to get the image.

Then I thought, maybe I need to decode the image before I pass it as an approval attachment. I tried with base64ToBinary function but that doesn't work either.

I have seen many posts regarding this issue but nothing seems to work. Can anyone help me solve the problem?

Here are the screenshots where I am creating the attachments array and later passing it to approval action.

[bsfegade · Accepted solution]

[aarijsiddiqui]

Thanks for the suggestion but that sadly didn't fix the problem 😕

[aarijsiddiqui]

I was able to solve the issue, The advice from @bsfegade was correct but incomplete. I needed to convert base64 to Binary before attaching it.

[GordoPwrApp]

@aarijsiddiqui I am having the same issue, where an approver is unable to open the attachment on their iPhone, however i am not using the http request trigger - i am just using the get attachment action from a sharepoint list. Can you explain how you converted base64 to Binary before attaching it? 

Thanks

[aarijsiddiqui]

Hi @GordoPwrApp ,

Can you share a screenshot how exactly you are attaching the image?

I had the following case:

when I was using compose action to construct an array before hand, then I needed to use base64ToBinary function (it is already available to use in power automate). And later attach that pre constructed array in the approval action. But when I removed the pre construction of the array and directly added attachment in the approval action then interestingly i didn’t need to convert it to binary. And could use the attachment as is. But what is important that you dont use quotes as @bsfegade suggested.

P.S: i don’t know your exact usecase, but i was able to omit the pre construction of attachment array because i was attaching only one attachment.

best regards

aarij

[GordoPwrApp]

@aarijsiddiqui Interesting. Thanks for the reply. Generally in my case a user would upload one attachment. The flow gets triggered When an item is created or modified in a SP list. I will try to directly add the attachment and see what happens.

Currently the flow looks like this-

 

 Which does give me the attachment in the approval in MS Teams on iPhone, but when i try to open it, it doesn't display the image, but tries to share it via the generic iphone options.

[aarijsiddiqui]

If you separately construct an array and then add that variable to Approvals, then you need base64ToBinary function. Please try directly adding the image to Approvals, since you only have one image, it should be fine. And please do post here if that worked or not 🙂

Best regards