Managing Public SharePoint Documents for Power Apps Portal and Internal Documents Using Cloud Flow (Part 8 of 8)

This is the eighth post in a series of Automating SharePoint Integration with Dataverse using Power Automate. You can check out the other posts via these links (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7)

Power Apps portal has the capability to upload and display documents to and from SharePoint directly to the Document Library related to a record. But sometimes, there is a requirement to manage two types of documents, one for the public documents visible to the portal user and the private documents which are supposed to be visible only for the internal Dynamics 365/Power Apps users. This can be achieved by uploading the public documents for the portal user to the Document Location which is created first and the private documents for the internal users can be uploaded to the second Document Location. (Special thanks to Gus Gonzalez for sharing this solution by Nicholas Hayduk.)

We can automate this solution by automatically creating the x2 Document Locations with a cloud flow as soon as the record is created. In the Part 1 post, I have explained how to automatically create SharePoint Document Location OnCreate of the record. This is the extension the previous solution with the additional steps to create the second Document Location.

These are all the steps included in the cloud flow for this solution. The following cloud flow is triggered on create of the Contact and creates the public Document Location for the portal user as in the Part 1 post and then, creates the private Document Location for the internal users.

1. Create Public Document Location
2. Create Private Document Location

🔗 1. Create Public Document Location

The first part of the cloud flow is almost the same as the the Part 1 post except the SharePoint folder path and Relative URL with "_Public" postfix (as highlighted in the screenshot above).

🔗 2. Create Private Document Location

After creating the first Document Location, delay the flow for 5 seconds to make sure that the timestamp of the second Document Location is different from the first one. The steps for creating a SharePoint folder and Document Location are almost exactly the ones as the public one except the "_Private" postfix (as highlighted in the screenshot).

After creating two Document Locations, the documents uploaded to the first Document Location (red highlighted ones) can be visible on the portal and the documents uploaded to the second Document Location (green highlighted ones) can be visible only to the internal Dynamics 365/Power Apps users. 

The user can see the documents from both location by manually selecting "All Locations" from the Document Location menu but that selection cannot be default. When the internal user opens the Documents tab, the Document Location in the first menu item is shown (e.g. Private Documents in this case when the Document Location name is sorted alphabetically).

Summary

When the SharePoint integration from Power Apps portals is enabled, the users can see all the SharePoint documents related to the record but we can upload the documents for internal purpose to the secondary Document Location and keep those hidden from the Portal user.