Approvalprocess - Comment not shown in SharePoint

[TommySandtorv]

Hello,

We've been working on this Power Automate which starts a document approval from SharePoint. The approval process works as expected, as it first sets the document to pending and waits for an approval or rejection.

When using the Submit action we save the request comment of the user to SharePoint, which can be seen in the version history (It is saved to the Check in comment field). We got this to work by adding the request comment to the comment section of "Set content approval status".

However, when using the Approve or reject action we again want to save the comment of the approver to SharePoint. In the flow, as shown underneath the comments are added in the comment section of "Set content approval status", but the value is not updated in SharePoint.

Is there anything we are missing, or doing wrong since it is not showing in SharePoint?

Any help would be highly appreciated!

Submit action

[GeorgiosG]

Hi @TommySandtorv ,

you mean the value for the column Comments is not set to "Ny foresporselGodkjent" from "Ny foresporsel" ?

Can you check if you have version history enabled for your list in SharePoint ?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-the-version-history-of-an-item-or-file-in-a-list-or-...

If it is enabled you can check what values have been modified for this specific column. 

Question: Are you trying to save the comment from the Approval in this column or a custom one you defined manually?

[TommySandtorv]

Hi @GeorgiosG ,

That is true, the comment is sett to "Ny forespørsel" at the start, if we start new approvals this part updates the comment to whatever the user puts in, but the column comments is not sett to "Ny forespørselGodkjent".

We have enabled version history, which only shows the comment as "Ny forespørsel". 

The initial idea was to use a custom one, but when we noticed that the comment from the submit action got saved to Check in comment column we thought it might be sufficient for our use case.
 

[GeorgiosG]

I understand, so currently you try to set this value manually. Could you please share images of the Update Actions in Edit mode ? That we can analyse what you save there. Comments column is from type single line of text right ?

[TommySandtorv]

Here are both of the actions, the first one is the submit which in fact saves the value to Comments.

The second one is the approve action, which does not save the updated value to Comments.

Unsure about the column type, as I believe that Check in comment is a built-in column, which is the column the submit action saves the comment.

[GeorgiosG]

Can you make a quick test and use just prior the Approve Update Action in SharePoint the action Compose and store your Comment variable in there. Just to double check the value you want to write in here.

[TommySandtorv]

In the automate we have this line to add the approvers comments to the variable. As you can see in the comment field, the value we want to write is correct for this instance.

I've also tried to type in a comment directly instead of using a variable, but that didn't work either.

[GeorgiosG]

Hmm ok that is a bit odd... I would try the following:

1. Go to your SP site and try to write a custom value in here directly via Edit

If this works, somehow the connection from your flow to SP is not working properly.

2. Try to create a new Comment column (CommentTest) and use that one to store in your values. 

If this works, get rid of the old one and use the new column for your comments.

[Gunilla]

Were you able to find a solution or a workaround to this problem? I am seeing the same problem:

• The comment from the Submit action is visible in the version history. 
• The comment from the Approve action is not visible in the version history. (But if you add the Approver Comments column, the comment from the Approve action is shown).

We would very much like the approver info to be shown in the version history.