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Using Flow to send an email summarizing SharePoint articles?

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Hello,

I'm new to Flow and am struggling a bit. I’m hoping one of you talented folks might be able to help out.

In summary, I am trying to create a Flow that would send a reoccurring (weekly) email to users that summarizes the new articles we have recently posted on SharePoint 365. It seems like this should be easy but I cannot figure it out.

Some additional requirements:

At minimum, the message needs to list out the titles to the new articles posted on our SharePoint along with a link to view the article.
- I do not want to include the full message. This would make the message too long plus we are trying to direct users to the site for tracking purposes.
- It would be nice to include some other attributes (e.g. created by) but this is not necessary.
I also need to be able to filter the articles included. I created a column for user type and each article that is posted indicates which user type(s) it is for. Rather than send everyone all articles, I want to only send them what is relevant to their user type. Side note, I’m not sure if this helps or not, but I did create a separate view for each user type so I’m not sure if we could pull from here and not have to filter?
Ideally, I would like to send the message on behalf of a generic mailbox, not from my profile.
Ideally, we would be able to group/sort the articles. I have a priority field that I created so I would group/sort by priority and then sort by date.

So far I have tried the following:

I found a template called "send a customized email when a new file is added" and tried to start with that. I got the email message working and was able to send it from the generic mailbox. However, I could not figure out how to change the trigger so that it would be a weekly summary and not every time something is added.
Next I tried to build my own.
- I started with Recurrence and was easily able to set that to weekly.
- Next I tried to find a way to pull in the article information. After much search I tried “Get files (properties only)” and I think this should work.
  - For this I was able to find the correct Site Address but the only option for Library Name was Documents and I want to reference Site Pages. I tried manually entering it but it didn’t like that. I eventually ended up copying over the Library Name that was appearing on the first flow I created and I think that might have worked.
  - There were options to Filter Query and Order By so I think these could help meet my requirements but I decided to hold off on playing around with this until I got the rest figured out.
- Next, I tried to push this information into an email. This is where I got hung up. I couldn’t figure out how to copy over the information from the 2nd step. I tried to mimic the logic of the first flow “Send an email” but I ran into issues because then it would be sending a separate email for each article. I cannot figure out how to send all of the articles in one email.

Thank you for your help! Any ideas you can provide would be much appreciated.

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rogrimbe Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi kharris1,

you are doing good.
just make use of the var very useful feature. initialize a string var and do the loop on him always appending the data you need
after that you can send it once in one email
hope this helps a bit and if you need further information just ask

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Thank you so much for your help! I'm still playing around with this but I think it should work.

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MattWeston365 1,701 on at

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Hi @Anonymous I wrote this blog article a while ago, see if this answers some of your questions. If not, I'll be happy to answer anything.

https://collab365.community/using-flow-sharepoint-news-notifications/

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bartvaneynde 33 on at

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@Anonymous I hope you are doing well in these challenging times.

Do you mind to share your entire flow? I'm trying to create the exact same but I'm unable to? I tried different approaches in Power Automate, I also made use of the News Digest-option in SharePoint but that option is quite basic an no custom modification can be done. Thank you very much.

Regards,
Bart Van Eynde

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mobilismexico 261 on at

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Is there a way to email the entire page content? not just the first paragraph from "Description".

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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@MO, yes there is a way to get the entire page's content. You can achieve it by making an HTTP request to SharePoint with the following URI:
_api/web/lists(guid'SITEPAGES LIST ID')/items(NEWSPAGE ID)/CanvasContent1

Use the following headers:
accept: application/json
odata: nometadata

On this site they explain it using another URI, but the idea is the same:
https://spblog.net/post/2019/04/22/microsoft-flow-guides-improve-sharepoint-modern-pages-approval-with-azure-content-moderation#:~:text=Let%27s%20do%20it%20in%20Flow%3A%C2%A0

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mobilismexico 261 on at

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thank you, @Anonymous ,
I'm struggling finding the SITEPAGES LIST ID and NEWSPAGE ID.

From a Get Items block I see some lines that may or may not be the NEWSPAGE ID. I have no clue as to where to obtain the Site Pages ID.

"{Identifier}": "SitePages%252f05-08-2022.aspx",
"{ContentType}": {
"@odata.type": "#Microsoft.Azure.Connectors.SharePoint.SPListExpandedContentType",
"Id": "0x0101009D1CB255DA76424F860D91F20E6C411800EC33C5EB059A8349BB2806C04F0AE5A3",
"Name": "Página del sitio"
},
"{ContentType}#Id": "0x0101009D1CB255DA76424F860D91F20E6C411800EC33C5EB059A8349BB2806C04F0AE5A3",
"{VersionNumber}": "1.0"

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mobilismexico 261 on at

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The NEWSPAGE ID is available as Dynamic content from the Get Items block.
I got the SITE PAGES ID from @RezaDorrani 's post: Get the ID of a Sharepoint List.
Another method to obtain the SITE PAGES ID is here.
Now, I only need to find out if there is an elegant way to retrieve the value from the HTTP request block, or I use the slice function to strip the unnecessary characters off the body:

{
"odata.metadata": "https:// bla bla bla",
"value": " the entire page is here! "
}

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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You can use the 'Parse JSON' action in Power Automate to make it easier available as dynamic content. In the Parse JSON action us this schema on the body of the HTTP request:
{
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"value": {
"type": "string"
}
}
}

After you do this, the dynamic value 'value' will contain the entire sitepage content

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