How to Send Microsoft Forms File Uploads to an Approval Workflow Using Power Automate

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This beginner’s tutorial will guide you through the process of creating an approval workflow for file attachments submitted via a Microsoft Form.

The flow will attach the uploaded file attachments to the approval action, making it easy for approvers to review and act upon them. This workflow is designed to work seamlessly even when multiple files are uploaded. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a solid understanding of how to create an approval workflow that utilises file attachments from a Microsoft Form.

The steps in the flow

1. A user completes a Microsoft Form and uploads files
2. Get the user’s Forms response
3. For each file that was uploaded, get its filename and content (uploaded files are stored in OneDrive)
4. Create an Approval and add attachments to the approval action

This is the Form we will use for the demo

What to do if your form has more than one File Upload question

The flow assumes that the Application form has only one file upload control. However, your form could have multiple file upload controls as we see in the example form called Weekly Menu Upload.

If your form has multiple file upload controls then see How to send Microsoft Forms file uploads with multiple questions to an Approval workflow using Power Automate.

The flow also assumes that file uploads are a required field meaning that users are required to attach a file before submitting the Application form:

If file uploads are optional in your form, then continue to follow the tutorial below, then make the changes as shown in the section Form is submitted without an uploaded file and the flow fails .

Here is the entire flow

Get the Forms response and initialize an array variable

We get the form response and initialize an array variable. The array variable will be used to store the attachment filenames and content:

The Apply to each loop

We need to loop through the details about each file that was uploaded and for that we will use the Apply to each loop.

We then need to get the following information about each file:

• filename
• file content

and then append the filename and file content to the attachments array.

We need the filename and content of the uploaded file. We then append this information to the attachments array.

This is the overall view of the Apply to each loop. I will break this down into their individual actions below:

The Apply to each loop requires information about the uploaded files to be in JSON format. We can construct an expression get this information into JSON format by “wrapping” the dynamic content for the Upload your file property inside a json function:

Get file metadata Action

Add a Get file metadata action:

and use the following expression as the file value:

items('Apply_to_each')?['id']

This action will later help us easily get the name of the uploaded file and its content.

Get file content action

Next we get the file content using the Get file content action as shown below:

Fill the array with the filename and file content

Add (append) the filename (Display name) and file content to the attachments array:

Here is closer view of the append to array action. The content of the array requires a specific format if it is going to be used as an attachment in the approval action:

You can type the content in manually or you can copy-and-paste the following code:

{
  "name": @{outputs('Get_file_metadata')?['body/DisplayName']},
  "content": @{body('Get_file_content')}
}

The Approval action

Add an approval action (e.g. Start and Wait for an approval) and insert the array variable in to the approval action:

And that’s it for the flow.

Runtime Outputs

Here is an example forms file with three files that have been uploaded:

Example email notification

Note that the file attachments have been sent along with the email notification:

Example Teams approval notification

Note that file attachments don’t appear in Teams approvals:

This may be a bug or a limitation of the current approvals notification sent by Power Automate. Have you found a way to make the attachments appear in the Teams app?

PROBLEM #1: Attachments not appearing in the approval notification message?

I have found that forms file attachments only appear in the email approval notification sent by Power Automate. File attachments don’t appear in the Teams approval so make sure that you have enabled notifications for the approval action. By enabling this setting Power Automate will send an email notification messages to the approver:

PROBLEM #2: Corrupt attachments? Attachments won’t open?

Different solutions on how to construct the attachments array have been discussed in Power Automate forums. The flow I have presented here seems to work with Forms file attachments for approval workflows.

However, if you find that in some instances the above does not work, i.e., the file attachment won’t open, I have included an alternative format for the attachments array.

You can copy and paste the following code in to the Append to Approval Attachments array variable action as shown above:

{
  "name": @{outputs('Get_file_metadata')?['body/DisplayName']},
  "content": {
    "$content-type": @{body('Get_file_content')?['$content-type']},
    "$content": @{body('Get_file_content')?['$content']}
  }
}

PROBLEM #3: Form is submitted without an uploaded file and the flow fails

If a file upload is an optional requirement in your form, a user could submit a form without a file and this will cause the flow to fail as there will be no file for the flow to process:

To fix the error you could (1) make the file upload a required field, or (2) change the flow to handle the situation if no file was uploaded.

Option 1: Make the file upload a required field

To fix this make the file upload a required field. The flow does not need to be changed.

Option 2: Change the flow to handle no file uploads

We can determine whether a file was uploaded or not by checking the forms response. We need to look at the content of the file upload field (property) shown below as Upload your file :

The Upload your file propetry field (it’s actual internal name inside my flow is r39184e70bc0845338547b8ac381488fd) will be empty if no files were uploaded. If a file was submitted with the form it will not be empty:

So let’s add a condition action to the flow to check whether the Upload your file property is NOT empty (i.e. it contains a file).

If the file upload field is not empty a file was uploaded and we can continue with the approval workflow as before. But if no file was uploaded, the flow will end at this point and we will take no further action in this demo flow as the purpose of the flow is to approve the file uploads. You can add actions to the No block below for when no file was uploaded by the user, such as sending an email to the submitter asking them to submit the approval if required.

The updated flow should now looks like this:

Alternative ending…

However, if you may want to still continue with the approval workflow even when a file was not uploaded. We need to make another change. Move the Start and wait for an approval action to the end of the flow. You should be able to select the Start and wait for an approval action and drag it outside of the Yes block:

The updated flow now looks like this: