Cancelling an approval is blank but not null?

[ABureaux]

Hello,

I am trying to account for canceled requests in my flows.

I did three tests with two people (edited order to match picture):

1. One approve, one reject

2. One approve, one cancel

3. Both approve

On the left is the result of my Flow's logic. On the right is the approval's Outcome

Scenarios #1 and #3 seem to work fine. It is when an approval is canceled that things seem to be not working?

I originally thought that a canceled request would contain "Cancel", but that is not the case. Then I thought it was just NULL, but that appears to also not be the case:

Any ideas?

[Pstork1]

If the Approval is set to all must approve and the second person cancels, then it isn't approved because the second person didn't approve it.  So Outcome is left blank.  One other thing to notice is that if the first person rejects then outcome will be just "reject".  It won't wait for the second person.

Normally, I use the logic of Outcome contains "Reject" for Rejected.  Then a second layer of Outcome is equal to blank to get Cancelled.

[ABureaux]

The "Approve" and "Reject" outcomes are easy as the responses actually contain "Approve" or "Reject" in some combination (depending on how many people are on the approval, the type of approval, and the order in which they respond).

Canceling an Approval causes this undesired behavior though (the "Status" column should read "Canceled", not "Approved", but the Flow logic isn't working. EDIT: "Hidden_Status" is still the Outcome of the Approval):

And here is my flow. Compared to my above post, the only change is I made is the logic for the nested "Canceled" Condition is now empty (formerly "NULL"). I also zoomed out so you can see that it is nested, with the first layer being a test for "Reject". Sounds similar to your set-up:

[Pstork1 · Accepted solution]

In my tests that logic works fine.  But your condition is backwards. When the outcome is equal to Blank then the approval has been cancelled.  In yours blank outcome leads to approved. 

One other thing to point out.  Only the flow maker has the ability to cancel the approval.  Regular users must either approve, reject or re-assign.  They don't get the option to cancel the approval.

[ABureaux]

Derp. You are correct. In my last test, I got my logic backwards. So, in summary for those doing approvals:

Approval Outcome	Dynamic Content	Logical Operator(1)	Value
Approved	Outcome	contain or is equal to	Approve
Rejected	Outcome	contains	Reject
Canceled(2)	Outcome	is equal to

 (1) When testing an item between Approved and Rejected, you want "contains" and not "is equal to" if there are more than one person on the approval

 (2) With the value for "Canceled" being blank, not the NULL expression.

I am still a little unclear on how the NULL expression and a blank cell are different, but this seems to be working, so I am happy. Thank you!

[Pstork1]

Just a reminder that in general you don't really need to worry about Cancelled.  Only the Maker of the flow has access to Cancelling the Approval.  Regular approvers don't

To clarify the difference between null and blank is the difference between null and "".  This is a common problem for Data base developers.  Some DBs handle null and an empty string as the same.  Some do not.  For Power Automate they are definitely not the same.  Null means the value doesn't exist.  An empty string exists, but its length is zero.

[ABureaux]

Good to know that is how Power Automate handles these values, thank you.

In the case of this approval flow, I dynamically specify the creator of the approval. The owner of the approval may be an approver, but not necessarily. In either case, they have the power/authority to cancel an approval if something goes "wrong". So, while it is definitely in the minority of our approval process, it is something that I would like to properly account for.

To give you an example: Just today, I had someone mention that one of their approvers went on mat leave without responding to the approval first. In this case, canceling and resubmitting with different approvers made the most sense. Again, this is a very fringe case.

[Pstork1]

Agreed,  Just wanted to make sure you were aware that it was a fringe case.

[wskinnermctc]

Thank you for that extra note! I would've been trying to accomodate Cancelled requests thinking other people could cancel them.