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Session Id :
Power Automate - Using Flows
Unanswered

Update Item deleting other fields that are left blank in the update item flow item

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Posted on by

We have a flow that for some reason has starting deleting fields from the update item section, we turned on versioning history to confirm that was happening. We went through every piece from PowerApps and SharePoint and it looks like the Update item in all of our flows is the culprit. Has anyone heard of the update item deleting sharepoint field data when it is left blank?

  • tmiller888 Profile Picture
    16 on at
    Re: Update Item deleting other fields that are left blank in the update item flow item

    Wow - this is quite the bug.  I've noticed it in a new workflow - that's not production yet luckily.  I have many Update Item actions and now I'm going to have to check them all.  Another option is to use the "Send an HTTP request to SharePoint" action instead.  I believe you might even be able to skip updating required fields with this action.

     

    Substitute your List Name and ItemIDNumber

    Uri: _api/web/lists/getbytitle('List Name')/items(ItemIDNumber)/validateUpdateListItem

     

    tmiller888_0-1693434164558.png

     

  • kreid68 Profile Picture
    3 on at
    Re: Update Item deleting other fields that are left blank in the update item flow item

    Brilliant!  Thank you 🙂

  • mwienold Profile Picture
    6 on at
    Re: Update Item deleting other fields that are left blank in the update item flow item

    In regards to using flows with Sharepoint: The best workaround I could come up with is to create a view for your list that explicitly calls out only the fields you want to change. 

    In the flow click Advanced options for the Update item and specify the view to use. This should greatly reduce the number of potential fields it wants to update.

  • thoang858 Profile Picture
    on at
    Re: Update Item deleting other fields that are left blank in the update item flow item

    Greetings. I am so glad that I am not the only one that was having this same problem. At the same time, it is frustrating. We have contacted Microsoft about this issue earlier on in 2019. We spent over 6 months working with their tier-3 support. It was frustrating that they blamed the issue on us stating because we had migrated the list affected from our SharePoint on-prem environment to O365. Long story short, we were able to replicate the issue with a new list on a different O365 tenant and nothing much came out of it. Just got the run around. 

     

    @Atarian - We found this work-around as well. The only issue with this is that you will have to note this workflow. If there are any future enhancements, meaning that you need to make changes to the workflow in the future, you will need to through the step of adding the Dynamic Content, saving the workflow then removing it.

     

    Another useful tip is to enable versioning on all list using Power Automate. This will help with restoring the deleted data. 

     

     

  • Community Power Platform Member Profile Picture
    on at
    Re: Update Item deleting other fields that are left blank in the update item flow item

    Amazing Tip, but still, they should improve the connector. 

  • mboonie Profile Picture
    164 on at
    Re: Update Item deleting other fields that are left blank in the update item flow item

    Best! Tip! Ever!

  • Atarian Profile Picture
    12 on at
    Re: Update Item deleting other fields that are left blank in the update item flow item

    I seemed to find solution: Add any Dynamic content into the field that gives you this problems, save the flow, and remove the Dynamic content by clicking on the cross next to it. This way the field is cleaned completely and will not wipe the existing records.

     

    This worked for me.

     

    You can double-check if you did it correctly, by selecting "Peek code" from the header of the flow step (three dots on the right side where the step name is. In the code you can see what will be updated (in my case, for all the fields that have been wiped out, the code was saying 

     

    "body": {
     "Title": "", 
     "Request": "",

     

    Where Title and Request were names of the fields which were being wiped. After I did the excercise described above, these lines from the code disappeared and the flow no more deleted the content of these two fields.

     

    B.T.W If anyone knows how to edit this flow "code" directly, let me know, as this would be a huge help for me.

    Thanks

  • mboonie Profile Picture
    164 on at
    Re: Update Item deleting other fields that are left blank in the update item flow item

    Hey, all... is there any update on this? I've actually had this start happening with several of my flows, which have been running for many months: if I don't provide a value in the Update action, it sometimes--but not ALWAYS--removes the data instead of leaving it alone. These are fields that have never been defined as Required, and this problem is recent!

  • clcssics Profile Picture
    2 on at
    Re: Update Item deleting other fields that are left blank in the update item flow item

    @Anonymous Did you ever find out what was causing this?

  • Community Power Platform Member Profile Picture
    on at
    Re: Update Item deleting other fields that are left blank in the update item flow item

    Sorry for the late response, we did confirm there are no spaces, and it only happens on certain flows, not all of them. Very odd it seems. I will give the dynamic content a try.

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