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How to get a link to Power Automate flow running on a specific SP item

Posted on August 18, 2021August 18, 2021 by Tom

“Can I link SharePoint item directly to a specific flow run to easily find the right Power Automate flow instance? It takes so long to find the right flow in the run history.”


If you run a flow very often, e.g. for each update of each SharePoint item, you’ll have a lots of runs. And lots of runs mean a lots of entries in the flow run history. And the more entries you have, the harder it gets to find the right one.

When you search for a flow that did run on a specific item, you might end up checking 10+ flow runs until you find the right one. It’s bit of a step back from the old SharePoint workflows where you could add the link to the flow with a single checkbox. If you want such a link to Power Automate flow, you must add it by yourself.

Build the link to the flow

Opening any existing flow run history in a browser, you’ll see that it has always the same format. There’s the environment id, flow id and flow run id, and then the rest of the url. Therefore, if you knew the 3 ids, you could build the link to the flow run manually.

https://emea.flow.microsoft.com/manage/environments/<environmentID>/flows/<flowId>/runs/<runId>

For example:

https://emea.flow.microsoft.com/manage/environments/Default-c3adda97-1234-44f6-9fbb-ecf0395f334b/flows/2ef6c1be-1234-4c58-8c69-55783da7f30e/runs/08585722999521234205098139360CU227

Power Automate has an expression workflow() that will give you all the information about the running flow. Among the information are the 3 id’s required to build the url. All you need to do is to build the whole url string by combining the fixed parts and the workflow() parts.

Power Automate item flow link

Build the whole url with the concat(…) expression, and workflow() expression with a bit of JSON navigation.

concat('https://flow.microsoft.com/manage/environments/', workflow()?['tags']['environmentName'], '/flows/', workflow()?['name'], '/runs/', workflow()?['run']['name'])

Store the url in a column in the SharePoint item and you’ll get a direct link to the flow run. Just be careful about the potential infinite trigger loop.

Summary

It’s easy to get lost in the flow run history if your flows run very often. Power Automate by itself doesn’t offer any connection, any link between a SharePoint item and a flow run. Therefore, if you want a direct link in the item properties, you must build and update it by yourself.

And it’s not the only usage of the link as already shown in the instant error messages from your flows.


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Do you struggle with the various expressions, conditions, filters, or HTTP requests available in Power Automate?

I send one email per week with a summary of the new solutions, designed to help even non IT people to automate some of their repetitive tasks.

All subscribers have also access to resources like a SharePoint Filter Query cheat sheet or Date expressions cheat sheet.

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Hello and welcome!

My name is Tom and I'm a business process automation consultant and Microsoft MVP living in the Czech Republic. I’ve been working with Microsoft technologies for almost 10 years, currently using mainly Power Automate, SharePoint, Teams, and the other M365 tools.

I believe that everyone can automate part of their work with the Power Automate platform. You can achieve a lot by "clicking" the flows in the designer, but you can achieve much more if you add a bit of coding knowledge. And that's what this blog is about.

To make the step from no-code Power Automate flows to low-code flows: using basic coding knowledge to build more complex yet more efficient flows to automate more of your daily tasks.

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