Set SharePoint Item-Level Permissions using Power Automate

In this post I’m going through the steps to update SharePoint Item-level permissions using Power Automate and The SharePoint Rest API.

Item-Level Permissions

Within the Advanced settings of a SharePoint list, the Item-Level Permissions the default settings are Read all items and Create and edit all items. You might however sometimes want to switch this to Read items that were created by user and Create items and edit items that were created by the user.

Using the SharePoint UI this is easy to update, but what if you want to update this as part of a site template.

Now I found a way to do this using PowerShell, but I really wanted to do this using Power Automate. Using out of the box Power Automate action, I can avoid the complexity of Azure Automate/Functions.

REST API for Item-Level Permissions

So now if we want to do the same in Power Automate then we can do this using the following flow settings:

Method: PATCH
Uri: /_api/web/lists/getbyTitle('Listname')
Accept: application/json; odata=nometadata
Content-type: application/json; odata=nometadata
IF-MATCH: *
Body:  {
            "ReadSecurity": 2, 
            "WriteSecurity: 2
       }

So with a simple REST API call in Power Automate we can update those advanced settings in SharePoint Online.

Pieter Veenstra

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com