Where do approvals go when there's no wait?

[annetoal]

If you Start and wait for an approval, you can capture the output of the approval and take actions on it.

What happens to the Approval if you Create an approval and don't have a Wait for approval step? The user receives the approval request, clicks "Approve," and then the result goes where?

Bit bucket?

Is there any way to capture that output without a Wait for approval and act on it?

Thanks,

Anne

[DamoBird365 · Accepted solution]

Hey @annetoal 

Approvals get saved to CDS / Dataverse and so you can use the trigger "when an record is updated" in the CDS to look for approvals being responded to if you don't wait for them using the other action.  This means that you can have an approval process beyond the 30 day limit if need be.  There is a good blog post about this functionality here.

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.
Cheers,
Damien

P.S. take a look at my new blog here

[annetoal]

Interesting information. I'll mark it as a solution because it solves the problem for some people, but not for me. I don't have a premium license and can't access the CDS connectors the blog post referenced. Any other ideas?

Anne

[DamoBird365]

Hey @annetoal 

I believe it was introduced to overcome the 30 day limit.  What is your reason for using it?  Maybe there is another way to achieve it with the approval and wait for response?  Then again - maybe not 🙂

Thanks

Damien

[annetoal]

I really appreciate the time and attention you've given my noob question. I have a library where there are about 400 documents. The documents have to be reviewed on an annual or biennial schedule. I wanted to write a Flow that would scan the documents for a Reviewdue date, send a reminder to the owner, and give them a button to click signifying the document was "review complete." This works fine using a regular Flow until you encounter a document owner who has 200 files to review. Each review notice comes up sequentially after the user clicks the "Complete" button. When the file is marked Complete, Flow updates columns in SharePoint accordingly. It would take forever to get through them all using the one at a time sequence.

So I decided to delete the wait for response, and now all the notices came through at once. Good. But I still needed to make changes to the SharePoint metadata, and now I lost the ability to grab the response to each approval request. 

I am thinking that maybe I need to get rid of the approval request and just make the notification an email/Teams message that tells you that it is time to review a file, then sends the user to SharePoint to make the changes to the metadata. It is surely not as good of a solution as the all-in-one approval request. What do you think. Worth doing?

[DamoBird365 · Accepted solution]

Hi @annetoal 

No problem, I get to learn in all of this too which is the aim.  If you are concerned about the wait between the approvals, can you use concurrency and allow them to run in parallel?  This way file owners will get the messages all in one go and you still have the ability to update your metadata in SharePoint.  I've never tried this though, so something to test and report back on.  Good luck!

Damien

[annetoal]

@DamoBird365 I set up three parallel branches and put an approval request at the top of each leg. I had six files to get approvals on. It sent me three identical copies of all six files--18 approvals in total. Can you explain how I could get it to go sequentially through the list of files down the parallel branches and not duplicate everything three times?

Anne

[DamoBird365 · Accepted solution]

@annetoal 

You would set this up on the apply to each on the 6 files by turning on concurrency via the elipses of the apply to each.  Up to 50 parallel runs - albeit I have never tried it on approvals so cannot comment on its success.  

I see where you are going, I suppose it would be possible to use the filter array to create 3 seperate lists and have 3 parallel branches - again - never tried it but could be an interesting experiment.

This article [end of doc] suggests that you can run approvals in parallel https://gov.flow.microsoft.us/hu-hu/blog/advanced-flow-of-the-week-send-parallel-approval-requests-t...

Damien