Adobe PDF OCR Scanned Archive to Searchable

Overview

CF-545 — built and verified (Flow Checker 0 errors / 0 warnings), ships Off. When a scanned, image-only PDF lands in a SharePoint archive library, this flow runs Adobe PDF Services OCR to produce a searchable PDF, replaces the image-only copy in place, extracts the recognized text with Adobe Extract, and indexes that text into Azure AI Search (mergeOrUpload). The result: a scanned-document archive that is fully searchable by content, not just by filename.

Why it matters: Image-only scans are invisible to enterprise search and eDiscovery. OCR + indexing unlocks the archive for retrieval, compliance, and discovery.

Solution: 1 cloud flow, 32 top-level actions, 2 bound connectors (SharePoint, Azure AI Search) + Adobe PDF Services REST over built-in HTTP.

Use Case

Records, legal, and IT teams holding large libraries of historical scans (contracts, invoices, correspondence) need them searchable by their actual content. Dropping a scan into the monitored library automatically converts it to a searchable PDF and pushes its text into the enterprise search index — no manual OCR step.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Connector	API name	Actions used
HHTTP	http	POST /token POST /assets PUT (upload) POST /operation/ocr POST /operation/extractpdf GET (status/download)
SharePoint	shared_sharepointonline	GetOnNewFileItems GetFileContent CreateFile ExtractFolderV2 GetFileContentByPath
Azure AI Search	shared_azureaisearch	IndexDocuments

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Point at your library

Set flowlibs_ScannedArchiveLibrary (and flowlibs_OcrWorkFolderPath) to your document library; set flowlibs_SharePointSiteURL if not the root site.

Index schema

Create the document-archive index (or rename via flowlibs_ArchiveSearchIndexName) with the required fields before turning the flow on.

OCR quality

Switch ocrType to searchable_image_exact in Start OCR Job to preserve image fidelity (default searchable_image compresses).

Vector / semantic search

Add an embeddings step and a vector field for semantic retrieval.

Chunking

Split long documents into multiple search docs with a shared parent id for better relevance.

Language auto-detect

Detect language per document instead of the fixed flowlibs_OcrLanguage for mixed archives.

Subfolders

The demo assumes scans arrive at the library root; for subfolders, derive the folder from the trigger path.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

{ "assetID": "@{body('Create_OCR_Source_Asset')?['assetID']}", "ocrLang": "@{variables('varOcrLanguage')}", "ocrType": "searchable_image" }

@coalesce(outputs('Start_OCR_Job')?['headers']?['location'], outputs('Start_OCR_Job')?['headers']?['Location'])

@{body('Get_OCR_Job_Status')?['asset']?['assetID']}

@coalesce(body('Get_Extract_Job_Status')?['content']?['downloadUri'], body('Get_Extract_Job_Status')?['asset']?['downloadUri'])

@concat('sp-', string(triggerOutputs()?['body/ID']))

Customize & download