SharePoint Online Sites, Lists, Libraries and Permissions
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Picking an approver in a SharePoint list, I typed "Olivia" and got Olivia Bennett, Head of Sales. Her job title had been changed to Emergency Department Manager in Microsoft Entra ID earlier the same day. Nothing was wrong with Entra: SharePoint keeps its own copy of each person's profile, and that copy hadn't caught up yet.
Thirteen parts planned, built, packaged and installed the Career Development Plan app. This last part walks through the finished app as an employee and as a manager, then gives you a checklist for running it for real, what it doesn't do, and every guide the series produced.
The app needs two SharePoint lists with exact column names, and so far they exist only because Part 2 made them by hand. This part builds a Power Automate flow that creates both lists, their settings and all 16 columns on any site, and that can run again without changing anything.
Every SharePoint list has a Title column, and you can't delete it. When a list uses its own columns instead, the usual answer is to make Title optional and hide it from the forms and the view. This guide does that with five REST requests from Power Automate, and checks the view before changing it, so the flow can run again safely.
A list is only useful with its columns. The REST API's createfieldasxml adds a column of any type from a short XML definition, including its internal name, whether it's required, its choices and its default value. This guide adds columns from a flow, one per item of a loop, and only when they're missing.
Most of a SharePoint list's settings are properties of the list, and the REST API changes them with a MERGE request: send only the properties you want to change, and the rest stay as they are. This guide sets a list's description, attachments, version history, navigation link and search setting from a flow.
The SharePoint connector has no Create list action, but the REST API does it in one request. This guide creates a custom list from a flow with Send an HTTP request to SharePoint, and shows what a list created this way looks like, because it isn't quite the same as one created in SharePoint.
A flow that creates a SharePoint list should check first whether it's already there. Then running it twice changes nothing, and a half-finished run can simply be run again. This guide checks for a list with one REST request and a condition.
Before a flow removes something, it should check that it's there. contains() answers that: does this array include this value? This guide uses it to check whether a SharePoint view shows a column before a step removes the column from it.
The SharePoint connector has ready-made actions for items and files, but not for everything, such as creating a list with its columns. Send an HTTP request to SharePoint fills the gap: it calls SharePoint's REST API with your connection. It's part of the standard SharePoint connector, so it needs no premium license. This guide builds a first request that reads a site's title.
