Error "ApprovalSubscriptionNotAllowed" when waiting on approval

[Rens_]

We have a Flow where an approval is created, some steps are executed, and then the Flow will wait until the approval is executed. At the step of waiting on the approval to be done, I sometimes receive the error 'ApprovalSubscriptionNotAllowed'. I can't pinpoint when this is happening and when it's not.

It looks like the error isn't documented.

The full error message is the following:

 The request failed. Error code: 'ApprovalSubscriptionNotAllowed'. Error Message: 'Cannot wait on this approval in its current state.'. 

[v-bacao-msft]

Hi @Rens_ ,

I am afraid that I could not reproduce this issue on my side and we never encountered the issue before.

Please consider sharing the detailed configuration of the Flow so that we could analyze this issue further.

Besides, you could try to use Start and wait for an approval action to configure Flow instead of using these two actions.

Best Regards,

[Rens_]

Hi Barry

Thanks for the feedback. I will try to change it to create and wait for approval. update: this isn't possible in our case as we are updating the list with the respond link

I can't reproduce the issue myself. Not on this tenant, not in this Flow, and not in other tenants. Any idea what the root cause of this issue is? Am I hitting some limits?

Thanks in advance.

[v-bacao-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Rens_ ,

Thank you for your reply!

I am afraid that I could not reproduce this issue on my side too.

Maybe this issue is related to the Common Data Service or Backend service.

If you want to solve this issue as soon as possible, please consider contact Microsoft Flow support to assist you with this issue. Engineers may need to crawl HTTP requests to help you analyze this problem, which can also solve your problem more efficiently.

Best Regards,

[Alfie_Smith]

Hi.

Did you found out what was causing this issue? If so, could you please share?

It is currently happening to me, and there is so little about it online!

Thank you.

[Rens_]

I changed the action to 'Start and wait for approval'. When I saw this didn't meet the requirements, it was changed back to the separate start approval and wait for approval. It didn't show up since.

It once popped up for 1 time in another Flow, but it couldn't be reproduced so I'm afraid I don't have a correct solution for you. I didn't bothered contacting Flow support to dive into this issue. I probably would have done it if the issue still persisted. Maybe you can use the support of the Flow team and keep u posted about a good fix?

BR

[Anonymous]

We have the same error.

I think I found the issue too. We have the requirement to create an approval and get the outcome later on in a different flow (at least I decided to do that to have smaller and less complicated flows).

For this, I store the ApprovalID in a Sharepointelement after teh creation and the other flow waits for an approval which has that stored ID.

I get this error everytime. I think it is because the approval is already finished (approved/declined) before the wait-action in the second flow gets called. This will be the case almost everytime in our use-case, so I contacted the support.

If we find anything further I'll let you know.

[Anonymous]

Hello again,

I have been in touch with the microsoft support, and my theory has been confirmed. If you take action in an approval before the flow gets to the "Wait for approval", this error happens.

However, this is expected behavior from Microsoft and not a bug. Personally, I don't know why. What's the point in having the start-action and the wait-action separately if it can get an error everytime you approve before the wait-action gets called?

A workaround for this is to work with the CDS and get the approval response for the approval you created there with the "List records"-Action from the CDS.

I hope this helps people in the future looking for this error 😉

Best regards

[JeffNg88]

This should be marked as answer instead. Thanks sir!

[TaxusLapis]

Hi @Rens_ ,

Even though this thread is old, I thought I'd add the solution I came up with so others might benefit.

I added a parallel branch. One branch contains the "wait for an approval", the other the notification. then I set a delay action to delay the sending of the notification so the "wait for an approval action" gets called earlier than anyone can react.
Parallel branch in approval scope

 Cheers

[stingray]

Had a call from MS support this morning to say the issue has been resolved, ive re-submitted one of my affected Flows and its gone straight through to the Wait for Approval Action.

We seem to have a lot of issues using the Wait for approval action, but i update a master log list for history of approvals using the Approval ID,  there may be a better way of actioning this by way or a parallel branch and changing to the normal create and wait approval action.