Approval Flow - Multiple Attachments & Two Approval Levels

[leegunn]

Hi there,

Hope you are all well. Our company is in the process of migrating to 365 from on premise and I am looking into building a flow to automate an approval mechanism, which is currently manual. It is safe to say, I am a complete novice at this – so any help or guidance will be gratefully received.

This form is to automate the process behind a new customer application. So the Trigger will be an MS form which may contain a single or up to five attachments. There will then be two approval layers.

Below is how I would like the flow to work – I may be being very optimistic and may have to make some compromises along the way, but this is what I am hoping to be possible.

1. User completes the new company request form, completing basic questions and attaching all supporting evidence/application form. I have a group form set up already.
2. Once the form has been submitted, the flow will get the response details and update the Sharepoint list with the data submitted, including links to the attachments within the sharepoint drive. I have the list set up within a specific team Sharepoint.
3. The first approval is then sent to two users which will contain information on the form submitted, attach the document(s) submitted and allow them to enter notes, which are also captured and passed to the next approval stage. If possible, another attachment (credit report) will be attached here, which can be done manually in the sharepoint list but must be included in the attachments at step 4.

If approved – move to step 4.

If rejected – an email is sent back to the form respondent advising of the outcome, with the notes and approver name being captured in the sharepoint list.

1. If stage 3 was approved, an approval email is sent to two new users, requesting their final approval of the account. This approval should contain basic info from the form (Account name, responder email etc), the attachment(s) and also include information from the previous approval such as the comments/notes added and their name.

Approved/rejected – the decision is sent back to the form responder, advising them of the outcome, including notes from both approval stages and their names.

The sharepoint list is then updated with the final outcome, notes and approver name.

Really hope you can help and point me in the right direction. I did have a go at the flow, but I cannot seem to get the attachments to work properly with the Approval tool, so deleted it in frustration, so ready to start afresh!

Thanks all,

Lee

[v-litu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @leegunn,

If you store these files into the SharePoint item attachment, please refer to the following steps:

1. Initialize an array variable named attachments;

2. then append these attachments into the array

{
   "name": "attachment name",
   "content": "base64 code"
}

3. After all attachments appended into array, input the array into the approval action。

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[leegunn]

Thanks so much @v-litu-msft, that is amazing!! So sorry for the delay coming back to you, have just found some time to go back over this. 

The flow executes perfectly, however when the approval arrives the attachments are there but are corrupt. Any idea what would cause that? 

Attached is some snips of the flow. 

Thanks so much for your help. 

   

[v-litu-msft]

Hi @leegunn,

It may be an issue about the Get attachment content action, you could have a try the Get file content action:

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Geastwood]

I am trying to do the exact same thing and my files are still coming into outlook with errors/corruption messages. Need help please!!! Everything else works great except the attachments in the email. 

[leegunn]

Hi @Geastwood,

I did manage to get this working but found the files to be huge in size, so in the end included a link to the Sharepoint list where the attachments were stored, so they have to be accessed there instead of from the email attachments. 

Would that work for you?