SharePoint Online Pages library is a container for different type of pages (News post, Page, Space, News Link) created in a Communication or Team site. There can be various scenarios to have a Power Automate Flow associated to a SharePoint Site pages library to handle additional processes after a Page or a News post is published. In this blog post, let us see how to
- Trigger the flow if a News post is published
- Trigger the flow only for Major versions
- Trigger the flow for a specific Content Type
- Avoid infinite trigger loop on an Item Created/Modified trigger if a page/list item is updated by the flow
using Trigger Conditions. Trigger conditions can be used on a trigger to stop your Automated Flow from running if the conditions are not met. Unnecessary flow runs can spend your quota limits based on the license types without providing any value. To begin with, create an automated cloud flow with the SharePoint trigger When an item is created or modified and configurations for the Site Pages Library. Once you provide the Site URL where your Site Pages library exists, you will notice the Site Pages library doesn’t show in the drop-down. In the List Name property, just provide the guid of the library instead.
To get the guid, browse to the Site Pages library on the SharePoint site, go to Library settings and select the value after the List= parameter on the URL after decoding.
Trigger the flow if a News post is published
There can be scenarios to trigger the Flow when a News post is created or modified. A SharePoint property PromotedState can help identify if the SharePoint page is a News post or a normal page since all the different types of pages are stored in the same library.
| Label | Value | What it means |
| NotPromoted | 0 | Regular Page |
| PromoteOnPublish | 1 | News post in draft mode |
| Promoted | 2 | Published News post |
The trigger condition will make sure the trigger is fired only when ever there is a News Post is published or Saved as draft (All Major and Minor versions).
@equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/PromotedState'],2)Now add the above trigger condition in the settings of the trigger as shown below
The above trigger condition will have the flow triggered for all major versions (1.0, 1.1 .. 2.0, 2.1, ..).
There can be multiple trigger conditions which accepts Boolean value (True or False), all conditions must be True for the trigger to fire.
To trigger the flow only on first Published version of the flow, add the following trigger condition.
@and(equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/PromotedState'],2),equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/{VersionNumber}'],'1.0'))To trigger the flow only on major versions and on News post, add the following trigger condition
@and(equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/PromotedState'],2),contains(triggerOutputs()?['body/{VersionNumber}'],'.0'))Trigger the flow only for Major versions
The following trigger condition will make sure to fire only for Major versions (1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc) and not for minor versions aka draft version (0.1, 0.2 etc)
@contains(triggerBody()?['{VersionNumber}'],'.0')Trigger the flow for a specific Content Type
Content types in SharePoint are a set of columns that are grouped together to serve a specific type of content (Crisis News, Marketing News etc). A Page or a News post in a SharePoint site can be associated with content types. The trigger condition for the flow to be triggered only for a specific content type is
@equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/{ContentType}/Name'], 'Name of the Content Type')Avoid infinite trigger loop on an Item Created/Modified trigger if a page/list item is updated by the flow
In your Automated cloud flow, if you have the Created or Modified trigger with an action to update the same item then there will be an infinite trigger loop.
The Flow checker will provide you a warning Actions in this flow may result in an infinite trigger loop. To overcome the above warning, trigger condition to the rescue.
How it will be done
The update item action on the flow should use a different connection (Service Account) in the flow, other than the user who will be using the site to create or update pages. The trigger condition will make sure the flow run will not happen if the update to the Page or News post is done by the service account using the Update item action. SharePoint Library and List has the out of the box column Modified By which holds the information on who has recently updated the item be it from the SharePoint UI or through program. The trigger condition will be written based on this column Modified By, if the column value has a different value other than the service account then the flow will be triggered.
Step 1: Create a service account with password never set to expire. Licenses are not required for this account if the flow connection is going to be used only on SharePoint connectors. Password setting Never Expires will make sure the connection is not invalidated due to a password change on the account.
Step 2: Grant edit access for the service account to the SharePoint site. This step allows the account to updates to the List or Library item.Step 3: Add a new connection to the service account
Step 4: Add the following trigger condition to the SharePoint trigger if the service account does not have an Exchange Email License
@not(equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/Editor/Claims'],'i:0#.f|membership|serviceaccountupn@domain.com'))Replace the serviceaccountupn@domain.com with actual UPN of the service account.
If the service account has email address or a license to email service, then the trigger condition should be
@not(equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/Editor/Email'],'serviceaccountemail@domain.com '))Tip to write the trigger condition:
Before adding the condition to the trigger, evaluate the condition on a compose action using expressions and data fields selected from Dynamic content.
After the condition is added on the compose action, click Peek code
Copy the expression from the inputs parameter
The condition to be added on the trigger must be True for the trigger to fire.
Summary:
Trigger conditions are powerful if used wisely to avoid unnecessary runs. I’ve shown some examples from the SharePoint pages library but it can be used on List trigger as well. The trigger can be written based on any data available on the trigger output. Hope you have found this informational & thanks for reading. If you are visiting my blog for the first time, please do look at my other blogposts.
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Mohamed Ashiq Faleel 