Recently Microsoft introduced Attention Views in the modern SharePoint look and feel.

Introduction to Attention Views

If you don’t know what Attention views are please have a look at Tracy van der Schyff’s post on Attention views. In this post I’m looking at the importance of check in and checkout of documents in relation to attention views.

In my case I’ve got a document library and I’m uploading documents by using drag and drop. All good and easy.

SharePoint Attention Views

You might however have noticed that documents are checked in even though required fields are not filled in. Is this right? You will even find that, as documents are checked in, your flows that are triggered by documents in this library will kick off.

If you don’t want flows to run without the required fields being completed, within Microsoft Flow you will need to check if your required fields have been filled in or not.

Today I had a more traditional user that doesn’t like the new stuff offered by the modern look and feel. therefore he switch back to classic using the Return to classic SharePoint link

Return to classic SharePoint

Again the same thing. He dragged a document into the library and the document remained checked out. When looking at the document in the modern look and feel the document was indeed checked out and flows were not triggered as they were owned by a service account.

Documents library with attention view and checked out document

If you now upload a document as the flow owner you will find that the flow does indeed trigger making it very confusing when you test your flows as you get different behaviour between users and flow owners when using classic library views.

My question now is should documents be checked in the modern look and feel when not all required field have been completed? What does required mean? Document check in/out has suddenly become a bit less obvious.

By Pieter Veenstra

Business Applications and Office Apps & Services Microsoft MVP working as a Microsoft Productivity Principal Consultant at HybrIT Services. You can contact me using contact@veenstra.me.uk.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: