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Updating list item without overwriting previous entry

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Posted on by workinganon

Hello All,

My goal is to create a flow for when someone responds to my ticket confirmation email it updates a "comment" column I've created in my list with their response. The flow works except when a new response comes through it will simply overwrite what was in the column previously. I would like it to add onto what was written previously. Hoping it will look something like this:

Person1@email.com

Sample text here.

Person2@email.com

Response to sample text here.

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Using flows

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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The Get Items will retrieve the existing items. That will give you access to the current comments. Just Concatenate that with the new comment retrieved from the Email and use the result to update the item.

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takolota1 4,974 Moderator on at

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Also some SharePoint columns have a built-in option to append any edits to the existing text.

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@takolota Just be aware that one problem with that solution is that Power Apps and Power Automate will only retrieve the last text entered into that column. To get all the entries you need to do a fairly complex process of retrieving all the previous versions. SharePoint does it in the list automatically, but its not easy to duplicate that elsewhere.

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takolota1 4,974 Moderator on at

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@Pstork1

Oh shoot. Thanks for the heads up, I’ve never needed to use it that way, I just saw the option one day while working on something else and thought “oh that’s a cool other way to do that.”

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Its a very nice option inside SharePoint, but its very difficult to work with it anywhere else. I didn't realize how it worked either until someone on the forums asked why they couldn't retrieve the full list. I built a solution to do it in Power Automate, but it requires using HTTP REST calls to retrieve all the versions and then filtering out the empty ones and concatenating the rest. Its not pretty.

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