Difficulty in running an ad-hoc Flow against a File in a SharePoint Library (not List)

merley72 — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 21:19:16 GMT

In readiness for potentially converting bunches of SharePoint Designer Workflows (and in order to try and stay at least in touch with current Microsoft technologies) I’ve done a bunch of tests in Flow against SharePoint Online sites and subsites using both the pre-built Templates and tried my hand at building my own. Whenever I select a pre-built template such as ‘Start approval when a new item is added’, it only refers to Lists that are held on the site. Other templates such as ‘Start an approval for new file to move it to a different location’ gives the user an option to select a Library which is great.

However I want to initiate a Flow on a Library document (File), in an ad-hoc manner not upon either Creation or Modification – I want the option to be User initiated at a point of my choosing. This is important when considering InfoPath based Forms in Office 365 as I need to potentially use these a number of times in different tenants.

If I look at the Trigger options for creating a brand new Flow from nothing (i.e. not using a Template), I see ‘SharePoint – For a selected ITEM’ option which when I saw that, it gave me the hope of being able to activate it as I wanted, but no, it appears it can only be used on LISTS – unless I am really missing something very basic. I read in the information tab (the little ‘I’ in a circle to the right of the line), it says the following:

“This trigger allows you to start a flow for a selected item in a SharePoint list or library. You can use the columns of the list or library as output parameters. For a file, you can use the "identifier" column to get file content “

I’ve tested the approach on list items and can run things in the ad-hoc fashion I’m looking for, however I cannot work out how I can use this trigger or any other method of activating a Flow on the Document / File in a LIBRARY.

Can anyone please tell me what I am doing wrong and importantly give links to guidance etc to help me on my way. Thanks

Microsoft Flow

Difficulty in running an ad-hoc Flow against a File in a SharePoint Library (not List)