Copying Files

In the previous chapter, you learned a few basic concepts for automating email tasks, such as receiving, sending, and handling attachments. Frequently, a work process requires that you copy or move files between locations in order to make data available to new groups of users or to integrate the files into another business process. For example, another flow may need to interact with a saved email attachment or a notification may need to be sent, stating that a file has been received.

Processing files as part of a flow can mean interacting with the file itself, as well as its properties. Power Automate provides us with the functionality to manipulate a file’s properties, its contents, and the object as a whole.

In this chapter, we’re going to focus on some basic file-related concepts:

• Learning about file connectors and actions
• Working with files

By the end of this chapter, you should be familiar with common file connectors...

Learning about file connectors and actions

In Chapter 3, Working with Email, you saw that Power Automate can work with files as attachments to emails. Work processes that require us to automate file attachments may also benefit from automating further processing with those files. Files may need to be copied or moved, uploaded to a new service, ingested into another platform, archived, parsed, analyzed, or require approvals. Learning how to reference files and their properties is an important building block to building more complex flows.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the file storage mechanisms that are available to use:

• SharePoint Online
• OneDrive for Business
• OneDrive
• Azure Files
• Google Drive
• Box
• Dropbox
• FTP/SFTP

Most organizations will use Power Automate primarily within the context of SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. However, most organizations also have access to or use other file-hosting...

Working with files

Files, from the perspective of Microsoft Power Automate, are objects that can be both the product and result of a workflow (as we saw in Chapter 3, Working with Email, when we looked at an expense report flow) or moved around through one. In this section, we’re going to build on the expense report flow from the last chapter and copy the file from the expense report document library to another SharePoint site for archival purposes.

We’ll also use Power Automate with another business scenario: publishing content to an outside storage service.

Copying files to SharePoint

Suppose your organization has a requirement to make an archival copy of all the content that passes through a particular work process. To demonstrate how to do this, we’re going to build on the flow we created in the last chapter in order to save email attachments and copy those file attachments to a new subfolder. We’re going to perform a series of steps to...

Summary

This chapter introduced a few new actions (Create folder and Copy file) for the SharePoint connector, a new connector to an external service (Dropbox), as well as the concepts of functions and expressions. Expressions can be used to further create custom content, calculate and format values, or extract data from entities.

Using these new components, you were able to copy files internally between SharePoint sites, as well as copy them to an external service. Both types of flows (copying files internally and externally) can be used as part of solving very common business automation problems. Increasing your familiarity with expressions will help you make detailed flows with customizable data output.

In the next chapter, we’ll shift the focus to creating instant or button flows.

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