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
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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.
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.
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.
When this above flow is triggered the run output will now display the responses given by the approver.
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.
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
To do anything with the CDS connector you will need a premium or premium trial licence.
Hi,
Should 2nd flow output shows the “pending” status as well? I have 2 approvers which one approved the other one is on pending.
Yes each status of each approval should be returned.
A very bad and complicated way of doing
Please do share your better way
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!
I think that you are looking for this post:
https://sharepains.com/2019/09/16/query-json-in-microsoft-flow/
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.
Maybe something has changed. Ibwoukd manually create an approval collect the data and then approve the request. Collect the data again and see what has changed.
Hi good article. Is there any way to make a collect data like SH 2010, in a form when a WF is running?
A power app( custom form) can collect data from nearly anywhere