PDFs Not Appearing in Recently Accessed Documents Immediately After Opening

Question

I am using the Microsoft Graph API to access recently accessed documents from OneDrive and SharePoint. While other document types (docx, xlsx, pptx) appear instantly after opening and refreshing, PDFs experience a significant delay before showing up in the Recently Accessed Documents section.

Steps to Reproduce:

Open a PDF document stored in OneDrive or SharePoint.

1. Refresh the Recently Accessed Documents section in oneDrive.
2. Observe that the PDF document does not appear immediately, while other document types do.
3. I ran the query GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/drive/recent in the Microsoft Graph API Explorer but did not see the recently accessed PDF in the response, even after editing the PDF 2 hours prior.
4. The issue appears to be specific to PDF files, as other document types are listed immediately.

Expected Result: PDF documents should appear in the Recently Accessed Documents (RAD) section immediately after opening, similar to other document types.

Actual Result: There is a significant delay before PDF documents appear in the Recently Accessed Documents (RAD) section.

Answer 1

Hi Trupti Nayak,

Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft!

I tried to reproduce the issue on my end. When I upload a new PDF file to OneDrive and update it, it appears immediately in the Recently Accessed Documents section using the Graph API. However, subsequent updates to the PDF take much longer to reflect in the Recently Accessed Documents section while using the drive/recent API. For other document types, this issue does not occur—they update instantly.

This seems to be a bug I recommend you raise a support case with Microsoft Graph, a Support Engineer will be able to look into this issue and assist you better. You can raise support ticket from New support request - Microsoft Entra admin center or https://admin.microsoft.com/#/support/requests.

Hope this helps.

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