How “Send an HTTP request to SharePoint” action changes everything for SharePoint operations in Flow.

I was pretty much new to Microsoft Flow two months back and used to just know about a few basic actions and triggers in MS Flow. Majority of my tasks included my flow to interact with SharePoint.

We do have a decent number of OOTB actions that allowed users to perform SharePoint Operations from Flow. But, as a developer, these actions were not helpful for many operations like breaking permissions, moving the item to a folder and many more.

This is where I started missing the SharePoint REST calls. And, after much exploration, I found that we didn’t have a capability to make SharePoint REST calls directly. The only workaround was to do it via HTTP request.

But this approach will need you to get Authorization Token to build SharePoint context and then, we can make our SharePoint HTTP request.

I realized that wasn’t this simpler in Workflow 2013, where I could make HTTP rest calls without much fuss. This made me think, is Flow really an alternative to Workflow 2013? If so, why can’t it perform operations that Workflow 2013 could?

And to my relief, I found an awesome action in SharePoint Connector i.e. “Send an HTTP request to SharePoint”. This totally changed my outlook towards flow. Now, I can swim freely into the vast sea of SharePoint.

With this action, we can now make any REST call to SharePoint without worrying about fetching SharePoint Context or getting Authorization Token.

PS: For any query, you would still need to have permissions on the resource you are fetching.