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Power Automate: Generate a SharePoint sharing link for a file for viewing but prevent downloading it
Power Automate: Generate a SharePoint sharing link for a file for viewing but prevent downloading it
Recently, a friend reached out to me asking about the action “Create sharing link for a file or folder” for the SharePoint connector in Power Automate:
I’m trying to understand if it’s possible to create a shared link for users via Power Automate to a SharePoint doc where the link type will be view-only without downloading. I can do it manually, but the SharePoint connector has 3 options:
I thought that maybe if I knew what it is called in the SharePoint backend, it could work with a custom value.
Because View only is “view” in a peek code, and View and edit is “edit”.
The links mentioned above are the ‘Sharing Links’
What are the SharePoint sharing links
SharePoint sharing links are one of the easiest ways to give people access to your documents without messing around with permission groups. When you create a sharing link, SharePoint generates a unique URL that you can send to anyone. The link determines exactly what the recipient can do with the file (like if they can edit it or just view it), and the audience/scope for it.
In Power Automate, the SharePoint connector gives us a built-in action called “Create sharing link for a file or folder” to automate this process. It works great for standard scenarios, but it does have some limitations right out of the box when you need more granular control, like preventing users from downloading the file, as my friend asked.
See how the current options are:
The solution
After chatting to my friend and they did some research, initially it seemed we needed to do this only via Rest API as described in a few articles around…
However, after using the option above ‘Enter custom value’ and trying the option blocksDownload, suggested for usage with the Rest API, it turns out it also works on the standard connector
Results
After running a flow with the action above on a SharePoint file, if we check the Links tab on the Manage Access option for the file, we can see the sharing link correctly generated:
References
How shareable links work in OneDrive and SharePoint in Microsoft 365
The post Power Automate: Generate a SharePoint sharing link for a file for viewing but prevent downloading it appeared first on michelcarlo.
