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.  

[PowerMar10]

I had this issue today, so I'm afraid it still can happen that someone is faster than lightning 🙂

[stingray]

Hi PowerMar10, ive had this issue using the Wait for approval connector, but unfortunately there's not much that can be done if you have actions in between creating and waiting for the approval that take a time to complete, you could try adding these additional actions to a parallel branch depending on how your flow works and there isn't a dependency on them.
If you dont have any actions in between i roccomend using the Create and Wait for approval, lets hope the product team pull something ou the bag when the new sequential apporvals come in May from the new release wave.

Btw you will need to turn these features on in the Admin console, and make sure that anything they are removing feature wise isnt in your production environment, for example they will be removing the legacy datverse connector, so you would need to make sure any Flows etc are not using this and have been migrated to the latest one.

Hope that helps.

[martiens]

I logged a ticket with Microsoft and the outcome is:
"As this is an expected behavior, could you please confirm, can we close this ticket?"

I never knew that a bug is expected behavior before this time 😞

For those encountering this issue, the true cause is that the flow task "create an approval" reports as successful, as soon as it's handed off execution to the Dataverse approval sub-system, as opposed to waiting on Dataverse approval registration, (which can last more than a minute in my case,) to fully complete before reporting success and continuing flow execution.

This means that if you attempt to take action on an approval shortly after it's creation reported as successful in MS flow, it may in fact still be in the process of Dataverse registration and as such, unavailable for any actions (like awaiting the approval), resulting in Error code: 'ApprovalSubscriptionNotAllowed'. Error Message: 'Cannot wait on this approval in its current state.'.

If you are licensed to access Dataverse, then monitoring the status of the approval created there would certainly be the best workaround -

For those without Dataverse licensing, the recommended workaround from MS is to introduce adequate delay in business process to accommodate the approval creation time...but there is no clarity what this delay time value is be based on, or whether time required will remain a constant value or could be influenced by other factors.

That's a pretty large failure in my book: hope it might be helpful to others to understand the mechanism that could lead to this state based failure; Please open a ticket if you run into this, seems MS needs motivation to correct bugs.

[Neros]

I'm facing the same problem. I've created separated flow to work with Approvals. One is responsible for creating Approval (and I have an action after this to store the Approval ID on a SharePoint List). Other is responsible to collect approval outcome (action "Wait for approval" with the mentioned ApprovalID). 

The problem occurs with the second flow. I've tested a lot here, and I got a possible scenario: if the responsible responds the Approval immediately when it appears on Teams, the second flow get the "ApprovalSubscription" error. However, if they wait at least 1 minute to respond, the approval outcome is successfully collected. I couldn' tell why, but it have worked for me. 

Thing is, how we tell users to wait one minute to respond, when we cannot really fix this issue because we don't have full control of this integration?