Category / Uncategorized

by Simon Doy

Issue with Microsoft Forms and Uploading File Questions and deleted folders


Introduction

We have been working on a solution with a local university and part of the solution makes use of Microsoft Forms and uses the file attachment feature.

By the way, this is only available to forms which are authenticated and is not available for anonymous forms.

Anyway the forms are associated with a Microsoft Teams group and one of the team did some tidying up of the default Shared Documents/Documents library in the Team site.

A few minutes later all the Microsoft Forms were unable to upload files….

So it turns out that Microsoft Forms uses the default Document Library and creates a Apps/Microsoft Forms/[Form Name]/[Question Name]/ folder which it uses to upload the files to.

Investigation

I’ll be honest that I had not really thought about the fact that the document library was being tidied up and the impact that might have had. The folders in question were moved to another Team’s channel so I thought, “well I will move it back”.

Unfortunately, that did not fix the issue and when the Microsoft Form loaded up it told me that it could not “create an upload file folder in OneDrive for Business”.

I had another idea, I will restore the folders from recycle bin. I had to be honest I thought this would work.. alas it did not.

So it seems that Forms includes a reference to the Id for the folder and I did not have a way of changing that.

So the solution….

Solution

So the solution was to recreate the file upload questions and then update the Power Automate flows consuming them.

Not really a great solution to be honest, but if anyone has worked out a proper solution, I would love to know. I will have to do some more digging when I get time… not sure when that will be 🙂

by Simon Doy

SharePoint Online Search Results and PnP Search Web Parts suddenly stops working


Introduction

We have been working at iThink 365 with one of the NHS Trust in the UK to move their SharePoint 2010 environment to SharePoint Online.

One of the tools that we have made a lot of use of is the excellent PnP Search Webparts. If you have not checked these out then you must do so, more information here (https://microsoft-search.github.io/pnp-modern-search/).

Here is an example of something that was built with them.

The strange thing we were seeing is that every once in a while the search results would stop working. No one seem to do anything or at least change anything but they would stop working.

The search results used custom search result sources (site settings -> manage result sources) and Microsoft SharePoint search rather than Microsoft Graph.

Resolution

After a lot of trying out different queries in the search result sources page the issue was down to one main issue.

Here is the original result source query which looked like this:

The fixed version ended up being this, do you see the subtle difference?

Note: the double quotes around the path.

On a couple of occasions the ” were stripped out of the query when a user went into the search results and we think that an administrator was saving the result query rather than cancelling and this seemed to break the search web part.

Anyway hope that helps someone as it took us a few hours to work out what was going on!