Approvals inside foreach loop - some questions about this.

[JeremyTBradshaw]

I've seen a few other questions asked, though they were more specific than my question so the answers didn't clear this up for me.  What I'm hoping to do is this - on a schedule, get all items from a SharePoint Online list, then foreach item, if a certain criteria is met, start and wait for an approval.  In this case, every item in the list is totally independent of the other items.

Where I'm having confusion is in multiple areas:

1. Will waiting for the approval hold up the entire foreach loop?  As in, does the first matching item's approval need to be responded to before the next item in the foreach loop will even begin processing?
2. I'd like to do some kind of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd attempt to get the Approval responded to.  Is there such a thing as sending a follow up on an open/pending Approval Request?  Like, wait 1 week, then send a reminder or new approval (that will last again for 1 week), and after all 3 have gone by unresponded-to, take some final action.
3. Is there any way to check for the existence of an existing approval for the current item?

Thanks very much in advance to anyone who can help me with these questions.

[fchopo · Accepted solution]

Hello @JeremyTBradshaw 

I'm try to answer your questions:

1) You can execute a parallel foreach loop up to 20 threads. So you can start an approval process for 20 items! You can configure it in the settings of the "apply to each" action:

2 and 3) You could create a column on the SharePoint list which stores the current approval value (not started, pending, approved, rejected). Therefore, you could create another flow to check those which are pending, and send an email to the approvers (which should be stored in another column). In this way you can solve questions 2 and 3.

You have an excelent example of this in this post: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/approval-reminders-using-parallel-branches/

Hope it helps!

Ferran

[JeremyTBradshaw]

Thanks very much @fchopo .  This is all great news.  So if I understand it correctly, if I have say 100 list items, once the 1st 20 are kicked off, and approvals are pending, the other 80 are waiting in line until slots free up in the 20 pool?

If so, I can work with this I think, just using deadlines and some kind of give up now then loop back through the list later technique.  20 slots is better than 1!

Last thing I'll ask, in that linked example (and thanks for that), is there any reason they went with 'Start an Approval' instead of 'Start and wait for an Approval'?

[fchopo]

Hello @JeremyTBradshaw 

Yes, you are right!  The apply for each is processed in batches of 20 elements.

If you "start and wait for an approval", the flow will stop there until there's a result, meanwhile when you use "start an approval" , you can execute more actions (calculations, for example) and after use "wait for an approval".

In the following link there is a clear explanation: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4513676/differences-between-flow-approval-actions

Hope it helps!

Ferran

[JeremyTBradshaw]

Thanks again @fchopo .  I'm going to need to spend some time with this still but you've helped me lots.

[JeremyTBradshaw]

Just wanted add a follow up.  I totally get now why I'd want to create an approval but not wait for it in the same flow /flow step.  I added an immediate step after the approval creation to take the new approval's ID and stick it in my SharePoint list.  I can now loop through that same list to check and process approvals.

Storing the ID of the approval is the revelation I'm sharing.  It was insinuated earlier with the advice to store the Approval status in the list.

Thanks again.

[JeremyTBradshaw]

@fchopo I'm back again.  And no pressure to personally have the answers for me, anyone else can chime in too.  I'm wondering how best to go about checking the status an an approval request or a response.  There are three entities in the CDS - Approval Requests, Approval Responses, and Approvals.  I'm able to get the ApprovalId from the original flow where I created the Approval.  But to query the CDS (sadly a premium feature), it starts to dive into OData filter and select queries, which is where I'm feeling a little iffy.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4559582/guidance-for-custom-solutions-using-approvals-data-...

This article makes it seem like relying on CDS queries from Power Automate in a production environment may not be such a good idea.

Am I way off track from a far simpler solution?  What I'm up against is a list of well over 20 items which are going to have Approvals created.  The timeout on these will be about 1 month, so ideally they won't hold up a single flow's foreach 20-max-concurrency.

The example you linked in your first reply @fchopo is a good start, but it seems like that parallel branch will just get caught up in my case, so I really need to use a new flow to check Approval status (response / no response) for my known ApprovalId's (known by capturing the ID in the Approval-creation flow.

**Edit/update:  In the end, it was pretty easy to use the CDS (current env.) > List Items action to query the 'Approval Responses' entity using the filter _msdyn_flow_approvalresponse_approval_value eq '[ApprovalId]' (where [ApprovalId] is from an earlier Get Items from a SharePoint List).  I then have a condition immediately after this, verifying whether the value returned from CDS List Items is null or not.