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Make different forms populate the same SharePoint list row

Writer's picture: Jon RussellJon Russell

Hey,


How are you all doing?


Hope you had a good weekend; I have had a stonking cold all weekend. I literally finished work on Friday and started feeling awful.


One thing that sorted me out though, was extra hot chicken wings from Nando's. Other chicken wings are available but they did seem to do the trick, well at least for 24 hours. It gave me enough energy to go out with my family to see a big bonfire just down the road from us.




Introduction


I came across this post on the Power Automate forums - here


The poster is trying to populate a SharePoint list, with multiple form responses.


I thought, well I haven't posted on the blog for a bit, so let's take this question and see if I can work it out here. This blog post is going to be pretty organic, as I work through the question and jot my thoughts down.


Step by Step


First things first, is that I need a piece of paper. From the post I know that I am going to need 4 forms. So, I am going to create these now, they are going to be pretty basic with one question in each.


Right, that is four forms created. Pretty standard stuff, done through https://forms.office.com, I have called them Form 1, Form 2, Form 3 and Form 4, so it is easy for me to spot them.


Next, as I can see this kind of working as a cascading kind of flow. I want to create a solution in https://make.powerapps.com as I believe at this point, I am going to be creating 4 flows, one for each form. At the end of form 2, 3 and 4 I want to ask the responder "What is the ID", we will find out why later in this post.


I have also created a SharePoint list called Multiple Forms, and in that SharePoint list, I have made the ID column visible and then created 4 new single line of text columns called


Form 1 answer

Form 2 answer

Form 3 answer

Form 4 answer


I then create an automate cloud flow, where the trigger is "When a new response is submitted" and call it Form 1.


I have set up the flow below.





It is important in the "Send an email" step, I pass the ID of the item created in SharePoint from the "Create Item" step, as the next person completing Form 2, will need to give that as an answer to the "What is the ID?" question.


The second flow, I'll call Form 2. Here, as in the first flow, I capture the details from the form, but this time I add a "Get Items" step. I then put in ID eq What is the ID (we don't need any quotes around the ID field as it is an integer) as the filter query, which then gives me a response of the SharePoint list item we created back in the first flow.





From this, we can now get the ID of the SharePoint item, and we can use an "Update Item" step, using thew ID from the "Get Items" step and then pop in the response from Form 2 into the Form 2 response field. Finally, we send an email to the next person we want to complete form 3 with the link to the Form and the ID that we need them to answer the "What is the ID?" question with.



Here is what the email looks like:



The cloud flow for Form 3, is basically the same as the flow that sorts out Form 2. The only difference is, that we are updating the Form 3 answer in the "Update Item" step and in the email we send to the person completing Form 4, there is a link to Form 4.


For Form 4 though, we want to send the responses of all of the questions back to the original submitter of the first form


The only real difference is the last step, we are choosing the responses from each of the forms from the Get Item step, apart from the answer to Form 4, which we can get from the Get Responses step inside this flow itself.




This then populated all the parts of my SharePoint list, all in one item:






Hope that all makes sense, if you have any questions leave a comment or send me an email - jon@jondoesflow.com

2,203 views8 comments

8 Comments


Shweta Vaghela
Shweta Vaghela
6 days ago

I have got a similar scenario, how do I capture the file uploaded in form 2 and send as attachments in approval in workflow 2?

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Rohit
Rohit
Oct 29, 2024

Can we use the SysTools SharePoint Migration Tool to achieve the task. Because I did several using this tool from https://www.systoolsgroup.com/sharepoint-migrator.html/

Edited
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Lauren Abrahamsen
Lauren Abrahamsen
Oct 17, 2023

Hi Jon! Thanks so much for this post. I have a question related to this post that I havent been able to find an answer to yet and was hoping maybe you had an idea :) Let's say that form 2 has 5 responses (ie the person filling out form 2 will have to answer 5 questions) and I want to join those to the same line in the sharepoint list as form 1- how would I set up that flow?


The real life situation is I have a form (form 1) that I fill out myself that captures the pertinent information that I need (ie: animal species, week of interest, farm ID, etc). This then populates my sharepoint list…


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Jon Russell
Jon Russell
Oct 18, 2023
Replying to

Hey Lauren, first of all, thank you for taking the time to comment. It’s really appreciated. I don’t have Power Automate open in front of me at the moment. But I think you would need to send some kind of identifier in the email body to the person filling in form 2 which allows you to link back to the ID of the row you created.


I would also think about scalability of your use case here. How big is your solution going to be ? Is it business critical, how many users do you expect to use the form? Do you need better security on the data being supplied ? If the answer is yes to any of those…

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Adam Zach
Adam Zach
May 19, 2023

Hi, do you have a way where the next person to fill in the form can see the answers to the previous form in a way that isn't just in email?

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Jon Russell
Jon Russell
Oct 18, 2023
Replying to

Hello Adam, thanks for your comment. Appreciate you taking the time to do so.


The next person would need to already be identified as a field on the previous answer set, then in a flow you could do a look up to that SharePoint list where that person has been stored on the row, then send them the data along with the link to form 2. Maybe you could have a question on form 1 which asks the respondent to add who should answer the next form ?

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phil.brown
May 16, 2023

Hi Jon, I have been struggling with this issue for a few weeks and could not find a solution. I have been through this article today and after a few changes to my set up, have managed to make it work. So pleased that I came accross your article and really grateful for your help. thank you. PB

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Jon Russell
Jon Russell
May 16, 2023
Replying to

Oh that’s amazing news. Can you explain a bit more about what your problem was and how this blog post solved it ? It could help others in the same situation.

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