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Flow Triggering on Every New SharePoint Attachment - Any Workaround To Prevent?

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

I raised a specific question yesterday which - from what I understand so far - doesn't have a direct, out of the box solution. And so I want to ask in a more general sense, knowing that there is a whole other layer to Flow when expressions are taken into consideration.

If I have any flow, whereby an item is added to a SharePoint list (Trigger = When SharePoint item is created or modified) and - using switches and conditions - it can go any number of 10 different people or locations, but at any stage or at multiple stages during the process an attachment may be attached to the list item - can anyone advise or suggest any possible way of achieving this without kicking off the flow every time a new attachment is attached? I would have thought there might be some expression I could use within the trigger condition to make this work?

The screenshot below shows the top of the flow I'm working on currently. Underneath the switch there are a multitude of possible paths, the specifics of the which shouldn't matter I don't think. I just want to have this flow and be able to allow people to attach things to the sharepoint object without retriggering (and rendering useless) the whole thing.

If anyone has any advise please let me know.

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Using flows

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ScottShearer 25,290 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@Anonymous

One way of approaching this issue, is to compare the values from the previous version of the list item (I am assuming that versioning is turned on) to the current values. If all of the previous values (except attachments) match the current values, then you can assume that the Flow was triggered because an attachment was added. There is no "out of the box" method to retrieve and compare current and previous versions of columns in a SharePoint list. However, here is a link to a blog post that I wrote that details how to compare current and previous column values by using the SharePoint HTTP connector (not premium). If all of the values (current and previous) match, use a control terminate action (with succcess) to end the Flow.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Thanks a lot for your response @ScottShearer , this is definitely the kind of thing I'm looking for. However there are two main differences between what your blog covers and what I'm looking for:

1 - Your blog shows how to watch for a particular column changing, and only do something when that column changes. I'm looking to do a sort of inverse where I want a particular column to not do anything. My assumption is that this be handled by basically initialising a variable for all the other columns and adding each of them into the condition as a new conditional?

2 - Again, the column I'm dealing with here and looking to ignore is the Attachments column. The attachment column behaves differently to other data columns though in that I can't seem to simply put 'Attachment' as the comparison during the compare condition. I'm assuming it's not a choice within dynamic content becasue it doesn't have a tangible value. I can and will try looking for a workaround on that, but if you know the answer (specifically if it's even possible) then please let me know.

Thanks again for the response, and for the blog - I think it will definitely come in handy, even if I can't get it working in this specific instance.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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To update on this. I actually got it working! I realised that my two points from before cancelled each other out, as I don't need to use the Attachment column in the conditional. Once I got it working though I quickly realised that the flow was - of course - discounting all of the newly created items, which I don't want. That's where I'm currently at. Thinking I'll probably need 2 different flows; one to solely handle the creation, and then this one which handles all of the modifications. Either way I'm sure I'll figure it out and I reckon your blog post counts as a solution to my original query, so thank you again.

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