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Sending an email with variable number of attachments

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Posted on by Community Power Pla...

I built a flow that drafts a specific type of email that my colleague sends out regularly. This email has to have PDF attachments that are pulled from one of our SharePoint libaries. Normally the emails contain two, but occasionally they contain three.

My issue is that the Send Email action fails if I've specified that there is an attachment name but instead the action receives a null value (since there is no attachment).

What I'm looking for is a way to create a custom Send Outlook Email connector that has flexibility built into the attachments section - the connector might have room for five attachments, but if an attachment isn't supplied, it doesn't error out. Does anyone know how I could go about doing this?

I even started to recreate the entire email generator in PowerApps, but I found that PowerApps can't pass PDFs to the table it requires for adding attachments to an email (it can only handle media files with their content stored as BLOBs).

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Building flows

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v-zhos-msft on at

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Hi @Anonymous ,

As you said, the pdf files are in a SharePoint library.

Are there other files you don't want to send as attachments in that library?

I have made a test on my side, I save the PDF files in one library without other files.

Expression reference:

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _ Zhongys

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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@v-zhos-msftThank you so much! I spent 30 hours trying to devise workarounds before you shared this with me. I didn't know supplying the attachments field with an array would get around the issue. The only change I made to what you described was that I entered "ContentBytes" instead of "ContentByte" (for any users who try this method). I really appreciate the help.

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DaynaBee 309 on at

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@v-zhos-msft
You saved my life!!! the reference link cleared up my confusion. Thank you!

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RBoneck 415 on at

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This looks like it works until I try to click on the attachment and then it says it can't find the file.

What did work for me was exactly this except for in the 'Append to array variable' action, instead of

body('Get_file_content')?['$Content']

in the ContentBytes field, I needed just

body('Get_file_content')

and then it works great!

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MarcelGerh 4 on at

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Same here.
I Think they changed something here...

But if I'm only using the body, then my PDF is just Blank - I can open it, the amount of pages are right, but nothing is visible.

Does someone know what the problem is?

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MarcelGerh 4 on at

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There were three mistakes:

1. In the Array there is written "ContentByte" and is has to be "ContentBytes".
2. Also in the newest PowerAutomate Version, the body of the ContentBytes has not to be
body('Get_file_content') and not body('Get_file_content')?['$Content'].
That has changed since October 2023.
3. In the Array around the contents of "Name" and the "ContentBytes", there are NO " " allowed! (no quotation marks)
If there are quotationmarks, the received PDF's in the mail are fully blank.

I hope I could help someone out here, searching for the same problems!

Here is a helpful video about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is5HSeXGdgk

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