Use Microsoft Flow to Copy SharePoint Metadata

As part of our ongoing series about Muhimbi's Microsoft Flow and Azure Logic Apps facilities, a quick post about copying SharePoint Online metadata.

When we first introduced the Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint, nearly ten years ago, we threw in a wildcard facility, something that we thought could be handy, but no-one had actually asked for... the ability to copy SharePoint metadata from one file to another. It turns out that customers absolutely love it.

Due to the popularity of this facility we released an improved version - at the time for SharePoint Designer workflows - that takes copying metadata to the next level and provide field level control about which metadata to copy, which fields to skip, and even the content type to apply.

Fast forward a couple of years and Microsoft Flow, Azure Logic Apps and our REST API have suddenly become popular. The focus is no longer on 'just SharePoint', but it still plays a large role and people still need to be able to copy metadata.

When we created our Flow Actions, and the underlying API, we made sure to bake in support for SharePoint metadata. It can be used as follows:

Create a Microsoft Flow / Azure Logic App as usual, insert a trigger and - in the appropriate place in the flow - choose the option to add a new action, enter copy metadata to filter the results.

Copy metadata - Search

This inserts the following Copy metadata action

Copy metadata - Action

The fields are as follows

  • Site URL: The fully qualified URL (including http(s)://) to the site (inc subsite) in which the metadata will be copied.

  • Source File URL: The file to copy metadata from, excluding http:// and domain name. ( details about specifying paths)

  • Destination file path: The file to copy metadata to, excluding http:// and domain name. ( details about specifying paths)

  • User name & Password (Optional): In environments where the Muhimbi App is NOT installed on the relevant site collection, it is a requirement to specify credentials to carry out the operation. In environments with Multi Factor Authentication specify an app password. We strongly recommend installing Muhimbi's App rather than embedding credentials into your flow.

  • Fields to copy (Optional): When left empty all fields are copied automatically. If one or more - but not all - fields need to be copied, then enter them here in a comma separated list.

  • Destination content type (Optional): While copying meta-data you have full control over the content type of the destination file. The following options can be specified:

    • (source): The content type of the source file is copied to the destination file. Please include the round brackets.

    • (target): The content type of the destination file is not modified and remains what it was before the copy operation. Please include the round brackets.

    • (default): The default content type for the document library is applied to the destination file. Please include the round brackets.

    • Name of Content type: The destination file is set to a specific, named, content type. Please do not use round brackets around the name of the content type.

That is all there is to it. The way our customers tend to use this is to use our facilities to convert, merge, watermark, secure and OCR files, write the generated file to SharePoint and then copy the various fields from one or more source items.

Any questions or comments? Leave a message below or contact our friendly support desk, we love talking to our customers.

Labels: Articles, Flow, meta-data, SharePoint Online

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