So today I started creating a new custom approval using Microsoft Flow. I had been working for about 15 minutes or so and thought to myself that it may be a really good idea for me to save my work because we all know that if I didn’t do it soon something would cause me to lose everything (because initial save hadn’t been accomplished yet. When I clicked on the save button I received an error I hadn’t received before. “Tag value to large. Following tag value…exceeded the maximum length. Maximum allowed length for tag value – ‘256’ characters.
Let’s admit it. Sometimes things just go wrong and you need an easy or straight forward way of cleaning it up and starting over again. An example of this happened to me the other day where I had a bad workflow that went unnoticed and started suspending. By the time it was noticed there were about 50+ suspended workflows (it was an active list). So after stopping the workflow I started working through cleaning it up and thought there has to be a way to terminate SharePoint 2013 workflows with PowerShell. Turns out I could do it. Here’s how:
A question I get often, especially around solutions where security is a big concern is “how can we see who looked\opened\updated\deleted an item in our document library. Updates, are easy if you have versioning enabled as it tracks each update in the version history, but what if you don’t want versioning enabled or you need to track the other items? Enter SharePoint audit reports. I previously blogged a detailed post on the audit logs within SharePoint. Basically, once enabled they will record everything that occurs within the site depending on the settings you select. You can find more information on it here. However, the problem with audit reports is you need site collection admin access to see them. This does not work in many instances as most end users don’t (and shouldn’t) have that level of access to your site collection. So how do you get them the reports without manually running the report for them each time they require it? This is what we are going to cover in this series. This post specifically will assist you in preparing the data for your users from the SharePoint GUI.
Quick Note: this may be an old topic, in fact I know it is. I started this blog two years ago and apparently forgot about it. I was going to trash it when I came across it but remembered that I still see a number of requests for setting up audit reports to automatically run for others. So I decided to complete it since it is still relevant for all versions of SharePoint including SharePoint Online
When the business wants to control the data that is displayed to users a great way to do this is with content approval. It’s easy to implement and use. Simply enable the option in version control and anyone with Full Control, Design or Approve role is able to approve the items.
There is a great write-up by Chakkaradeep Chandran on how to automate the approval process of these items. However, what Microsft Flow is missing is the ability to see what status the approval process is at. There are many requests for this information in the Flow forums with no solutions beyond statements that Flow is lacking in this ability. I was able to come up with a working solution to achieve this. So read on to learn how to determine the approval status of a SharePoint list or library item.