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Append selected new items from one list to another

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

With SharePoint designer workflows, it was possible to delete the list associated with the workflow. The workflow would continue to work when a list with the same name was created again.

This allowed creating a (temporary) list by exporting a table from Excel and appending records to different other lists based on certain criteria in the items exported from Excel.You could then delete the temporary list and repeat the process with a different Excel source table, and so on. A perfect way to append data from multiple Excel files to a given existing SP list.

Now with MS Flow, once you delete a list, Flow loses the connection and will not associate itself again with that list when one with the same name is created. Is there a workaround? It would be a pity to loose that functionality.

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v-xida-msft Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @Anonymous,

I think your thought is correct. When you created a SP list connection within your flow, if you delete the SP list, the flow would lose connection to this SP list.

Even though, you re-created a SP list with same name as before, the flow would not recognize this SP list automatically. Actually, the SharePoint connector within Microsoft Flow find the specific list via a series of GUID string (e.g. '173056e5-b540-49eb-83be-c4680cbbf248').

The GUID string (e.g. '173056e5-b540-49eb-83be-c4680cbbf248') is generated by SharePoint automatically when you created a list within your SharePoint Site. In addition, the GUID string identify a List within your SharePoint Site uniquely. Although, you created a SP list with same name as before, the GUID string is different. So the flow could not recognize the new created SP list automatically.

Currently, you could only re-choose the new created SP list within your flow manually to achieve your needs.

If you would like this feature to be improved, please submit an idea to Flow Ideas Forum:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Flow-Ideas/idb-p/FlowIdeas

Best regards,

Kris

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @v-xida-msft thanks for the prompt response. Indeed, the flow shows the GUID of the list that has been deleted. With SP Designer workflows it retained the name of the list, and creating a new list using Export from Excel table (which requires the existing list to be deleted first) would automatically continue the workflow. I understand that this is no longer possible with MS Flow.

I can think of two workarounds:
a) an option to Append records to an existing list when exporting from an Excel table
b) an option to re-use the same GUID for the new list when exporting from an Excel table and specifying an existing list name

If option a) can be implemented, option b) would of course be redundant.
If appending items to an existing list is not possible, then option b) instead of just telling that this list name cannot be used because a list with the same name exists, offer the options to either replace it with a new list (with new GUID) or replace the contents only (maintaining the same GUID).

I'm going to post this in the Flow Ideas.

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