Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Objective:

I need help designing a Power Automate flow that creates a customer-specific PO folder structure in SharePoint based on values from a list item.

Target folder structure:

Documents → Customers → <Customer Name> → Purchase Orders → <PO Number>

Data source:

The flow is triggered from a SharePoint list row.

PO Number: plain text column in the list
Customer Name: must come from a column called Customer_Text

Why Customer_Text is required:

The list also contains a Customer column that is a lookup/hyperlink to a separate Customers list (used for customer history and metadata). When referenced in Power Automate for folder creation, this Customer column resolves to a URL/object, not the display name.

To support folder naming, a hidden text column (Customer_Text) is populated via a background workflow that extracts the customer’s display text.

Important caveat:

The Customer_Text column is populated asynchronously by its own workflow when a new row is created or modified. This often occurs at roughly the same time the PO Number is entered, so the folder creation flow must reliably reference Customer_Text only after it has been populated.

Ask:

Can someone provide a recommended Power Automate flow design (trigger + actions + conditions) to reliably create this folder structure using Customer_Text and PO Number, given that Customer_Text is populated by a background workflow and cannot be sourced directly from the lookup column?

Categories:

Building flows

Hello @CU21010431-0

Regarding the background workflow ... not sure if the "natural" latency between creating SharePoint list item and triggering the flow to create the dynamic folder path would be enough of a delay but we can address that after solving for the main flow.

A pattern often used is to create a placeholder file using the Create File action for OneDrive for Business. This will automatically create the folder structure using dynamic content that you pick (PO number and Customer Name) if that folder structure does not already exist. Then you could delete the placeholder file with flow or just leave it.

First screen shot is the entire flow: