Hi @JesseTaylor ,
Welcome to the Community 🙂
Here are some quick instructions about how to add a new List item whenever a new file is added to a SharePoint folder.
Overview on Folder and List
I've just created a SharePoint folder called "Landing Folder" to receive the new documents/files that will be inserted in the list.
The list will store the file name (title column), the creation date and the file extension (.pdf, .xlsx...):
Step 1 - Creating your flow
In Power Automate, create a new automated cloud flow and choose "When a file is created (properties only)" as trigger (eventually you will have two triggers, one of them deprecated):
After clicking 'Create', you will navigate to the 'Flow edit' page. click in the trigger and a left pane will appear, containing some settings, and there you will enter the details about the SharePoint folder that you want to monitor (Site Address, Library Name and the Folder path):
Step 2 - Adding item to List
Now it's time to insert a new action to add a new item into the List. Click in the '+' below the trigger (highlighted in yellow) and a new pane will be displayed, containing the list of actions to be included in your flow. Search for 'create item' (highlighted in green), and select 'Crete Item' from SharePoint connector (highlighted in blue):
Again, a settings pane will appear, where you must enter data about the list that you want to populate. After populating it, click in the 'Advanced parameters' dropdown and check the items corresponding to the List columns (highlighted in yellow):
Step 3 - Populating the 'Create item' action:
Click in one of the column inputs and then in the highlighted icon, which will give you access to the dynamic content selection:
Here you will find all properties from the previous steps (in this case, the trigger only), where you can find the 'Name' property:
Populate all fields with the relevant dynamic content. For the 'File Extension', we're using the
last(split(item()?['{FilenameWithExtension}'], '.')) expression, which applies some text transformation methods to extract the file extension from the file name:
To add an expression in Power Automate, click in the 'Fx' icon, right below the dynamic content one:
After that, your flow is ready to run. Save it and add a new file to the desired folder.
Note: at this point, it is possible that Power Automate added a 'For each' loop automatically to your flow. It happens because one of the properties accessed by the dynamic content must be allocated inside an array. You don't need to make any change in this 'For each'.
Testing the flow
After adding a file to the folder, it may take some seconds to the flow run. I've added an empty Excel file called 'Book.xlsx':
You can find all the recent flow runs in your flow page, in the table below:
The List is automatically populated after the flow run, capturing the relevant data from the file added to the folder:
The example above is pretty simple and probably won't be matching perfectly to your specific use case. If you need help in capturing some other metadata from the file added to the SharePoint folder, let me know and I will be glad in guiding you 🙂
Further reading
Since you are new to Power Automate, I'm sharing some blog posts that I've wrote in the past and are related to the topics discussed here:
- Dynamic contents: http://digitalmill.net/2023/07/31/using-dynamic-content-in-power-automate/
- Arrays and loops: http://digitalmill.net/2023/07/12/using-loops-and-accessing-array-elements-in-power-automate/
- Text operations: http://digitalmill.net/2023/08/12/how-to-extract-and-clean-texts-with-power-automate/
Let me know if it works for you or if you need any additional help!
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http://digitalmill.net/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/raphael-haus-zaneti/
