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How to know if a file is being modified by user

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Posted on by MJKjoachim

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I'm currently using a flow which create a notification in a Teams channel when a file is create in a SharePoint library.

I would like to extend the function to also have a notification when the files are modified.

The problem is it create a large amount of notifications even the user modifiy up to a 1 tipo in the file.

So I would like to restrain the notification with this idea : IF file is <in use> THEN abort notification.

I went through all "get file property" actions, but could not find which property I could use to put in place my code.

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Building flows

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Nived_Nambiar 18,129 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @MJKjoachim

May be i am confused a little, what u meany by 1 tipo here?

Also could you elaborate this? So I would like to restrain the notification with this idea : IF file is <in use> THEN abort notification.

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MJKjoachim 104 on at

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Hello @Nived_Nambiar ,

Thank you for your feedback.
What I mean is during preliminary test of my flow, I could see there is a lot of notifications which are triggered by flow as soon as anything is modified by user.
For example, this will result as an enormous amount of notification when the user is modifying a file from a blank file.
This huge amount of notifications will drown the chat in Teams and lose the user in all these notifications.

So my point is to block the notification if I can detect that the file is still opened or used by a user.
The notification will be done only when the user quit and close the file.

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Nived_Nambiar 18,129 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @MJKjoachim

Try this approach

Hope this helps 🙂

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AnathiMj 29 on at

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Please check if you are not doing any updates in the flow which will always trigger your flow

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MJKjoachim 104 on at

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Dear @Nived_Nambiar ,

I tried the solution you proposed but unfortunately, the library where the file is stored do not have the checkin/out mendatory.
It means the file will be in checkout status = false when user modify it.

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MJKjoachim 104 on at

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Actually, I tried a workaround the "Modified" timestamp.
To limit the number of notification, I calculated the difference of time between the Modified and UTCNow.
if the time is bigger than 5min, I post a message.

UTCticks = ticks(UTCNow())
Modifiedticks = ticks of "Modified" of the file passed through a timezone convertion
Expression = div(sub(variables('UTCticks'),variables('Modifiedticks')), 600000000)

The problem I didn't think about is the flow trigger is the modification itself, so the time difference will be always less than 5min...

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Nived_Nambiar 18,129 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @MJKjoachim

I thought checkout would work

Since you said using modification, you have to make the flow to run a specified time instead of trigger flow then

But one question there is, does modified duration give any sign that file is closed ?

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MJKjoachim 104 on at

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Actually I was thinking that if the file has been not modified since 5min, it means probably the file is not editing anymore.
As we do not have any way to valid if the file is opened or closed, I postpone my idea for later.

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