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:
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.
Now that I have completed my series on building a modern solution with SharePoint, PowerApps and Flow I want to start building on that solution. The next enhancement I wanted to do was allow the capture comments from the approver in Microsoft Flow. So whether the approver approved or rejected the request I want to be able to capture the comments if they provided any. Because this is building on my previous solution you can see how that was built by clicking here.
Something that is used a lot in Microsoft Flow is the HTTP request. Whether you are calling a site’s REST endpoint or an Azure function, or in the case of today a SharePoint REST endpoint you need to be able to do something with the data returned. The steps to do that are very simple and only require a free tool called Fiddler. You can download Fiddler here (please note: I have nothing to do with Telerik, it’s just a nice tool I use often). Go ahead and download the tool and we’ll move forward with the steps parsing JSON in Microsoft Flow
Something that I have come across a lot is solutions that require setting item level security after a particular occurrence on the list item (or in some workflow process). Specifically what I wanted to look at was how to do it using SharePoint Groups as opposed to AD users, though I will probably cover that later. This is going to be a two-part post as well because I am also going to do it with Microsoft Flow in my next blog. Moving forward, whenever I do a SharePoint Designer Workflow blog I am going to try and do a corresponding one for Flow as well.