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I believe there's an issue with "If another file is already there"

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Posted on by Community Power Pla...

I've got a handful of flows as part of my business processes which relocate files submitted via an MS Form to a central location on a sharepoint site.

This includes Sharepoint Copy file and Move File.

About a week or two ago, these flows started to fail and investigating the route cause leads to the same conclusion, that, if there is a pre-existing file with the same name the flow fails. This is despite the flows having "If another file is already there" set to copy/move with a new name which as mentioned had been working fine.

There's nothing to change in the flow and nothing has been changed in the flow. This leads me to believe that Microsoft has made a change somewhere in the Powerautomate system.

This needs to be investigated as it's causing serious workflow issues.

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Building flows

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Just tested using the below and worked completely fine?

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Riyaz_riz11 3,891 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @Anonymous

If file already exists it will create error.

So you need to check with some conditions.

I will share the steps how i was faced those challenges.

Regards

Ahammad Riyaz

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Thanks for the response but it shouldn't need that. This is my copy file failure, can clearly see that it's set to rename the file if there's a file already there and it worked on my test but in this instance, it doesn't. Even the error says that there's an existing file with that name.

It's just not renaming the file?!

This was my test that worked
test.file and test1.file

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Community Power Pla... on at

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I've found the issue. It's not an issue with the 'copy with new name' function, but more an issue with how the sharepoint action handles the address or 'File Identifier'

If I used the Picker to select a folder in the File Identifier box, it works fine.

If I type it in, it fails

And to prove it's not case sensitive, still fails when directory is typed in.

This issue occurs with List Folder, Copy File and Move File sharepoint actions including if the directory is in a variable or not.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Sussed it, it's because there is now additional encoding to the directory strings that wasn't there previously.

When using the picker, you get
%252fShared%2bDocuments%252fGeneral
which is why it works when using the picker.

When typing the directory or using compose/variable to hold the string
which doesn't work

But, inputting the decoded symbols into a compose/variable works

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v-qiaqi@microsoft.com on at

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Hi @Anonymous,

Glad that you have resolved your problem.

Please mark your reply as an answer.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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It hasn't solved the problem because it was working before.

Basically, something has changed in the power automate system where it no longer decodes symbols used for directory operations.

I shouldn't be having to input URL encoded values in!

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KvB1 1,596 on at

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What would be the added benefit of manually typing in the path rather than using dynamic content?

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Community Power Pla... on at

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So during this flow, the path technically doesn't exist and is created earlier in the flow so dynamic content doesn't work.

The folder path is a string, created from various other strings and then used to create the directory and then move files into.

As mentioned, it was working fine but something has changed in the Powerautomate system where the symbols (spaces, slashes etc) are no longer decoded for the URL

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Community Power Pla... on at

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This still hasn't been fixed. I've got other flows that Move files from one location to another when an MS Form is submitted. Despite the 'Move File' being set to move with a new name if another file is already there, it doesn't, it just fails.

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