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Attachments in Approval Email Cannot Be Opened from AzureDevops Work Items

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Posted on by BojaKassem

Dear Power Automate Community,

I am experiencing an issue with my Power Automate flow. The flow retrieves attachments from Azure DevOps, processes them, and sends them in the Start and Wait for an Approval action. While the flow executes successfully, the attachments in the approval email cannot be opened and appear corrupted or unsupported.

Steps Taken:

Verified the content is Base64-encoded and decodes correctly.
Confirmed the array structure (name and content) is correct.
Ensured file names have proper extensions and are under 5MB.

Despite these checks, the attachments remain unopenable. I would appreciate any insights into why this might occur or suggestions for resolving the issue.

Thank you for your assistance!

Best regards,
AK

Categories:

Building flows

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Ellis Karim 11,657 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @BojaKassem,

In some instances the file attachment won’t open. You can try an alternative format for the attachments array:

{ "content": { "$content-type": items('Apply_to_each')?['contentType'], "$content": items('Apply_to_each')?['contentBytes'] }, "name": items('Apply_to_each')?['name'] }

See:

📝Best Practices for Formatting File Attachment Arrays in Approvals, Outlook Emails, OneDrive, and SharePoint – Ellis Karim's Blog

How to Send Microsoft Forms File Uploads to an Approval Workflow Using Power Automate – Ellis Karim's Blog

Ellis Karim
Blog: https://elliskarim.com

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BojaKassem 2 on at

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Hi @EKarim This is the output after i updated the append to array it was fetching

the attachments when it was like:

{
"name": "@{outputs('Attachment_Name')}",
"content": {
"$content-type": "@{if(empty(outputs('Attachment_Details')?['$content-type']), 'application/octet-stream', outputs('Attachment_Details')?['$content-type'])}",
"$content": "@{base64(outputs('Attachment_Content'))}"
}
}

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