SharePoint Document library moving files to different on Metadata change

If you remember the SharePoint’s Drop off library which was a special type of library which is setup for organizing content in SharePoint sites and to enable that you need to enable content organizer feature from site settings. It was used to route document to different document libraries based on metadata.

We can achieve the similar functionality in modern document libraries using Power Automate flow document property change where we can move the file to a different document library based on metadata value.

Power Automate to Move files

I have created a document library Marketing and added a choice column Status. When the value of Status column changes to Complete, file will be moved to a different document library named as Destination.

Create a new which will start on When a file is created or modified (properties only), it wil require site url, library name and folder path.

Now add the action Get changes for an item or a file (properties only), this would require Site Address, library name, document ID and Since filed to get the changes to make a comparison. To get the latest changes, we use the following expression.

sub(int(triggerOutputs()?['body/{VersionNumber}']),1)

Above setup will return the modified properties details. Now add a condtion to verify if Status value is change.

If the value is true, you need to fetch the file properties using Get File Properties action where you can get the file properties using ID parameter. After that you need to add another condition to compare if the status field value is changed to Completed.

Now the last step, if the above condition is true, you need to add the Move File action which will move the file to destination folder. You would need to pass Current Site Adress and File identifier and after that update the values for Destination Site URL and Destination folder path. I have added Replace but you can select a different option as per need if another file already exists with the same name.

Save the Power Automate Flow and copy a file to the Marketing library and change the Status value to completed. This flow will add move the file from marketing to the Destination library. So now following similar steps you can use a single document library to move files to different locations which could help you to achieve the same functionality as of Drop Off library with the help of Power Automate flow.