I had a task where I needed to get the current content approval status from documents in a SharePoint Online document library. This as such is no big deal while the “Get files properties only” action can give you that information very simple.
The easy way is to just add the “Get files (properties only)” action and a “Filter array” action or a “Condition” action on the result and your are good to go:
In my case that did not quite solve my problem. To be more effective I wanted to filter out all pending approvals only in my “Get files (properties only)” action. No need to parse all other documents.
And this is where things got a bit complicated, and then again quite simple. If you look at the result from the “Get files (properties only)”, it has a json structure like the below where the “Content approval status” field is found as “ModerationStatus” which looks like the SharePoint internal name for “Approval status”:
Ok, so let’s try inserting this into the “Filter Query” of the “Get files (properties only)” action…
Result: Error “Column ‘ModerationStatus’ does not exist”…
Alright Power Automate, what is wrong here?
Well, you need to look deeper into SharePoint, this is where the root cause is. The ‘ModerationStatus’ field has an internal name of ”OData__ModerationStatus” and this is the name you need to use (please note the name is spelled with double underscore)…
This is not logic while Power Automate actually translates the “Approval status” field into “ModerationStatus” when being used in Power Automate expressions.
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