Approval Flow - Start another approval after rejection and SharePoint doc is modified

[aaeaea]

Hello,

I am fairly new to Power Automate, and am having some trouble in my latest approval flow, hoping someone can help me figure this last step out! Apologies for the long post..

Some background
The flow/process is a recruitment process so our staff can submit a new recruitment packet to our HR team, which will then post the recruitment to a website.

1. User fills out an MS form

2. Once the form is submitted, it populates a Word template with content control boxes and track changes on

3. Creates a new Word doc based off the template in a SharePoint library (both form submitter and their managers have edit access)

4. Starts an approval with the form submitters manager (I have a Do-Until action here to prevent it from going to our director).

5. If they approve > Apply to each loop to get the manager of the form submitters manager (deputy director)

6. If the deputy director approves, I have a condition to break out of the loop and then sends an email to HR and the flow is complete

I can't figure out how to start another approval if the form submitters manager rejects it in Step 4, I want it to send an email back to the form submitter with the recruitment Word doc that has the changes from the manager. Once that Word doc is modified by the form submitter, it would start another approval with their manager.

Here is the flow I have so far

Steps 1-3 collecting the form responses, get manager of form submitter, MS Word template, create file in SP library (this part works fine):

Step 4-5, do until it goes to our director or the approval is denied/rejected (maybe I don't need the last part?)

Apply to each loop with condition. This is the part I am struggling with, the If No part needs to send an email, have the form submitter make the suggested changes to the word doc, then start an approval with their manager again once they have modified the doc. I just added the actions to the If No part how I think it should go

It then breaks out of the loop if everyone approves, and sends everything to HR (this part works fine).

If everyone approves it works great no problems, if the manager of the form submitter rejects it just loops back to the 'Manager Approval' step and loops until you approve it, then breaks out and continues on.

If you need any more explanation please let me know, hopefully this makes sense.. 😄

Thanks!

[annetoal · Accepted solution]

Insert a condition to test for the Outcome of your Approval action right after the Approval. You're looking for Reject. The outcome will look similar to this expression:

outputs('Wait_for_an_approval')?['body/outcome']

Then in the Yes side of the condition, put the next approval action. If it's an Approve, it will go down the No side of the condition, so leave No empty so it passes on down to the next step in your Flow.

If this helped, please mark this as a Solution.

Thanks!

Anne

[aaeaea]

Hi Anne,

Thank you for the help, I did add a condition to test the outcome of the first approval action based on Reject and it worked!

This is the flow with the changes

I had to add the variable on the No side to break it out of the loop. The only problem I have now is when the manager of the form submitter rejects the approval, it sends an email to the form submitter, they make the suggested changes but at the same time that is happening, the manager gets the 'updated document approval' step right away, before the form submitter can make the suggested changes.

I need a step where the red circle is between send email and updated document approval, where it would configure the updated document approval to run after the document is modified perhaps? A time delay? Do you have any ideas what would be the best trigger or action for the updated document approval step to kick off? It needs to be after the form submitter is done making the changes to the document.

[annetoal · Accepted solution]

Instead of using Start and wait for an approval, use Create approval and Wait for an approval. Then you can stick whatever actions you want between the approval request and when the response is received.

Anne

[aaeaea]

I think I have it working now, under the Yes condition I am sending an email with options to the form submitter with an 'Approve' button, when they make the changes to the recruitment document, the next Create approval action is configured to run after the send an email with options is 'Successful'.

It then continues on after the manager approves.

Might need some more slight tweaks to the wording in each steps and instructions for the users but I am satisfied its working! Thank you for the suggestions, I will accept your post as a solution