Response visible in the approval output

When a flow in Power Automate contains approval steps it can be important to collect the current approval details. Being able to collect the intermediate responses of a Flow approval could help you inform the requestor who has already responded and who has not when multiple people are required to respond.

Create an approval flow

First I will create a flow with an approval step that is assigned to multiple people. In my example below I used the Create an approval step and selected as the approval type Approve/Reject – Everyone must approve. It is of course also possible to select the Custom approval type.

An Approval workflow

Now that we have an outstanding approval step I’m approving the action as one user so that the approval step isn’t complete and I want to collect the response from the first person approving.

Wait for an approval

Adding a wait for an approval step will now stop my flow until both approvers have responded. Therefore this doesn’t give me any option to run other actions to check the status. Unless I use a parallel branch or I could create a second flow.

Wait for an approval

In this case I’m going to create a second flow.

Collect intermediate responses

We are now ready to collect intermediate responses of my approval step that was started in the first flow.

My second flow will use the When a record is updated from the Common Data Service connector. The entity that I want to trigger on is Approval Responses.

Collect intermediate responses

When this above flow is triggered the run output will now display the responses  given by the approver.

Response visible in the approval output

Now all we need to do is query the json to get to the right data and then we can use this data to send out email alerts to the person requesting the approval.

Avatar for Pieter Veenstra

By Pieter Veenstra

Business Applications Microsoft MVP working as a Principal Architect at HybrIT Services Ltd. You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com

12 thoughts on “Collect intermediate responses of Flow Approvals”
  1. Hi Pieter,
    I tried that with my environment, but it did not work. Do you have any idea what it could be? Does it require a special license?
    Thanks,
    Ingrid

  2. Hi,
    Should 2nd flow output shows the “pending” status as well? I have 2 approvers which one approved the other one is on pending.

  3. Do you have a post on how to query the JSON to do the next steps? I need to send an update to the Requestor about the intermediate approvals. Many Thanks!

  4. I tried but the entity “Approval Responses” only updates when all have approved, which is worthless since I can also get that in the original flow. I noted another entity “Approvals” does update on first approval, but it only contains the request data, not the response. Not sure how did you manage to get the response data. Thanks.

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