Premise

In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to run any SharePoint REST API directly from MS Flow. MS FLow already provides lots of action cards OOTB. For ex, create a list, delete a list, etc. However, it doesn’t contain action cards for, let’s say, every possible operation within SharePoint. Microsoft has intentionally provided, only the commonly used actions to MS Flow. This also makes sense because, one of the key attribute of MS Flow lies in its simplicity and how, even a business user can perform simple tasks on their own. Rather than having the users lost in a plethora of choices, they are presenting them with only a list of commonly used tasks. For everything else, there’s REST API.

In this post, I’ll perform one of the admin related task. I will fetch a list of all the current site collection administrators whenever this flow is triggered. This cannot be achieved using OOTB actions. So, I’ll be running a SharePoint REST API to achieve the same.

SharePoint REST API from MS Flow

• I have created a new flow from blank, GetAllSiteAdmins. The trigger of this flow is set to SharePoint – For a selected item. A selected item trigger let’s you trigger a flow on a particular item.

  

• To this flow, add a new action, Send an HTTP request to SharePoint. This is the action, which is responsible for making REST calls to SharePoint.

  

• To fetch the list of all the Site Administrators, we have to execute the following REST call,
  /_vti_bin/ListData.svc/UserInformationList?$select=Name,WorkEmail&$filter=IsSiteAdmin eq true


  Set the above call to the Uri property of this action.

  

• As we have set the accept parameter to JSON, we’ll need to parse this JSON response now. To do it, I’ve added a new action, Parse JSON.

  

• The content property of the Parse JSON action is set to the response body of its predecessor. To generate a schema, use the following sample payload.

  {
    "d": {
      "results": [
        {
          "__metadata": {
            "uri": "",
            "etag": "W/\"5\"",
            "type": "Microsoft.SharePoint.DataService.UserInformationListItem"
          },
          "Name": "Piyush-TeamSite",
          "WorkEmail": ""
        }
      ]
    }
  }
  

• Initialize an array variable. We’ll add the names of all the administrators to this array.

  

• Add an, Apply to each action. Since, there can be multiple administrators, we need to recurse over all of their names.

  

• Append to our array variable, email ids of all the admins.
  concat(items('Apply_to_each')?['Name'], ' : ', items('Apply_to_each')?['WorkEmail'])

  

• Add the names of all the admins in a new line.
  join(variables('adminAry'), '<br />')


  

• Finally, send this list in an email.

  

Run the Flow

On running this flow, it’ll send me the names and email addresses of all the site collection administrators of the given site. In my case, there’s only 1 admin.

Key Takeaways

• MS Flows, itself is pretty useful. Coupled with SharePoint REST APIs, it provides us with options to automate various tasks.
• Previously, we were required to Register App in SharePoint, get access tokens, and then only make HTTP requests to SharePoint. This has been greatly simplified with the introduction of the action card, Send an HTTP Request to SharePoint.