Saving Form attachments with hyperlinks in Excel

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Posted on by MT-14081211-0

I am making changes to a flow in preparation for the upcoming Excel updates and need some help with the attachments piece. My original process was built using Forms for Excel, with the spreadsheet being resident in a SharePoint document library. The form responses populate on the spreadsheet, and attachments from the form are uploaded to another document library with links to them listed on the spreadsheet. I also previously created a flow to send an email notification when receiving a new response is received.

The email notification flow has been modified so responses will continue updating on the spreadsheet after the update takes place. This had been tested and is working properly; however, attachments from the form aren't uploading to the document libraries and the spreadsheet cells where the links used to populate now have verbiage starting with " [{"name";" " followed by the filename of the attachment and don't do anything when clicking on them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also, if there's a different methodology for the attachments that would work better I'm open to suggestions.

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Mark Nanneman 993 Moderator on at

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It sounds like you are just dumping the attachments array into your sharepoint cells as a string.

Does your form accept multiple file uploads or just one?

The file attachments property of your form comes out as a json array in a string, and you have to convert it to a JSON array with JSON() before you can work with it.

To save each attachment to a spreadsheet cell you would need to loop through your attachment array after making it a JSON and reference whatever property you want to save. For example, to save the "link" property you would write "item()?['link'].

You could also concat an html href element like "concat('<a href="',item()?['link'],'>',item()?['name'],'</a>')"

Here's a file upload on a form:

if you check the output of a flow run, it's a JSON array in string format:

it looks like this when converted to a proper JSON:

[

{

"name": "Filename.pdf",

"link": "https://your-sharepoint-site.com/personal/your-domain-name/Documents/Apps/Microsoft%20Forms/File%20Attachments%20Form/Question/filename.pdf",

"id": "01E7....",

"type": null,

"size": 1284780,

"referenceId": "01E...",

"driveId": "b!NkY...",

"status": 1,

"uploadSessionUrl": null

}

]

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MT-14081211-0 6 on at

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Mark, thanks for your response, I appreciate it. To answer your question, the form has three separate questions asking for file attachments, with a limit of one attachment per question.

I'm not familiar with JSON, so will need to get myself educated on it. Based on your response, I'm understanding that I need to convert the JSON string to a JSON array, then loop that through each question for each attachment (i.e., "Apply to Each" step in the flow), is that correct? Will that also save the attachments to the document library, or are other steps required for that?

Mike

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