Sending Mass/Bulk Approvals - Not one at a time

[golfnutt82]

Hello,
I have posted about this before but did not receive any assistance.
My guess is what I was asking for is impossible or I didn't explain myself, which I thought I did the last time.
So, I am attempting to put this entire workflow in a Quarterly schedule workflow and tweak it.

What is currently happening: The workflow is sending one approval for each item that is "Active" and then waiting for the approval, which is fine. If it's not approved on time, the workflow sends a reminder email. Good, that works but it's not what I want.

The current process won't send the next approval until the first one is approved - Not what I want!
If I have 10 items in a list that are active, I want 10 approvals to hit my inbox and then for each of those I want to log my approval outcomes and other properties.

Below are some screen shots
Thanks again for your help.

[Mister_Shaik]

Hi @golfnutt82 ,

Have you tried to enable concurrency? Once you enable concurrency on the first "Apply to each" loop, the flow will run all 10 approval instances of yours parallelly and all approvals will hit your inbox.

If you think that your items are greater than 50 before apply the IF condition, then you can use a "Filter" action to first apply your IF condition and pass that output as input to the Loop.

Hope this helps 🙂

Kind Regards,

Shaik Sha
________________________________________________________________________
If I have answered your question, please mark the post as Solved.
If you like my response, please give it a Thumbs Up.

[golfnutt82]

Hello and thank you for that!
I will turn that on.
Yes, there will be more than 50.
How would I apply an if statement to handle the rest?

[Mister_Shaik]

@golfnutt82 ,

First of all, to filter out the items that need to be sent for approval, you can add a "Filter array" action to filter the output of your "Get items" or you can build an expression, then pass the output as input to the Apply to each array.

If you think that the number of items to be send for approval (aka the items with "Active" status), then you can build Parent-Child flows. 

The Parent flow will get the items, filter them and split into arrays of 50 items each. Then each of those 50 item arrays would be passed to the child flow, where you'll run the approval with "Apply to each" using concurrency.

It might be an extra effort but doing this will basically eliminate the limit to parallel instances running for approval - you can send 100s or 1000s of approvals at once, as each approval is running in a separate instance. (But you need to consider if there'll be any throttling, based on your license plan)

Kind Regards,

Shaik Sha
________________________________________________________________________
If I have answered your question, please mark the post as Solved.
If you like my response, please give it a Thumbs Up.

[golfnutt82]

This sound exactly what I need to do.
I will use what you have provided.
Great learning experience.
Thank you!
I will reply if I have questions or concerns if that is ok?

[Mister_Shaik]

Sure, Anytime 🙂

[golfnutt82]

Hello Mr. Shaik,
Do you have an example of how this would work for my particular situation?
Thank you!

[Mister_Shaik · Accepted solution]

Hi @golfnutt82 ,

Just wrote a blog on how to achieve BULK approvals, which can send out 2500 approvals at once and capture the responses.

Bulk Approvals Using Parent-Child Flows – Mister Shaik

Hope this helps 🙂

Kind Regards,

Shaik Sha
________________________________________________________________________
If I have answered your question, please mark the post as Solved.
If you like my response, please give it a Thumbs Up.