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Manage sequential approvals with Power Automate: Show attachments in notification sent to reviewer

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Posted on by tpcolson

For the sake of simplicity and ease of reproducible steps, let's say I'm using Manage sequential approvals with Power Automate - Power Automate | Microsoft Learn with one change: as part of the process, the person submitting the vacation request must also submit a file attachment (pdf) to their request that is proof that they took the "how to take a vacation" training. So the workflow is, they go the sharepoint list, fill out their vacation request details which include uploading the pdf-proof-of-training in the attachment-enabled list.

In the Start and Wait for Approval Card there is an Item Link where I currently have it set to "Link to Item". The approver gets a powerautomate approval request email, and the link to the item is the ENTIRE sharepoint item, with all of the columns and the file attachment way down at the bottom.

What I need is just a link to the attachment, or the attachment added to an email. All I need the approver to see as part of their approval process is that this attachment has been uploaded (and they can open the attachment). They need no other information to approve the request.

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David_MA 15,079 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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I assume your flow is on a SharePoint list that allows attachments. If so, the field you are using (Link to item) is indeed tied to the list item. To point to an attachment, you need to first use the action Get attachments (note this action is plural which means it returns an array even if there are only one attachment). You would follow this with an Apply to each action since the prior action returns an array. The get attachments action returns these values and AbsoluteUri is the value you need:

Since you'll need to create the approval within the apply to each, more than one approval will be created if more than one attachment has been added to the list item. If you are sure that only the one PDF is attached, you should be all set. Otherwise, you'll need to figure out how to deal with multiple attachments.

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DJ_Jamba 2,837 Moderator on at

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Hi @tpcolson
You need to get the first document from Attachments which will give you the name of the document and the link to it.
Then you can put the link to the attachment in the Item Link field

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tpcolson 82 on at

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So this gets me in the right direction, thanks! But....
Not exactly sure where to put the get file attachments in the flow, or how/what to "feed" into the apply to each. What I've tried makes the flow fail:

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David_MA 15,079 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Where you put it in your flow looks correct to me. Based on what you asked, you just need to populate the Item Link in your approval with the dynamic value AbsoluteUri from the Get attachments action.

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DJ_Jamba 2,837 Moderator on at

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I’m not at a pc so doing this from memory!
Add a compose action after the get attachments action.
in the compose action it’s something like the following as an expression:
first(outputs(‘Get_attachments’)).Attachments

Now you have a single record in that compose to which you can retrieve the attachment url e.g.
outputs(‘Compose’)?[‘AbsoluteUri’]

and the name of the file e.g.
outputs(‘Compose’)?[‘DisplayName’]

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tpcolson 82 on at

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I am doing exactly that it fails

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tpcolson 82 on at

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tpcolson 82 on at

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DJ_Jamba 2,837 Moderator on at

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I'm at a pc now 😂
The correct syntax for the compose is:
first(body('Get_attachments'))

Then you can access URL and Name of attachment from the compose (my Compose is called Compose 2)
AbsoluteUri outputs('Compose_2')?['AbsoluteUri'] DisplayName: outputs('Compose_2')?['DisplayName']

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tpcolson 82 on at

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So, that solved one problem but created another! Ugh.....

Here's what I have so far:

But it is putting the link to the attachment in the approver notification

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