How to Trigger PowerAutomate Approval Flow based on value/date in SP List Column

[Anonymous]

Hello, I am having a bit of trouble achieving what I am looking to accomplish and I have gone back to the drawing board a couple times in redesigning my flow/logic 

My objective is to trigger a PowerAutomate Approval Flow based on a value/date in SP List Column - specifically when the current date is within a year from the value defined in my date column

- When I configure it as a Recurrence/Scheduled flow, it successfully triggers approval flows, however, upon the next recurrence (cycle scheduled at 1x per day) it kicks off another approval flow even when approval was already provided for the specific line item the previous day

Thus, I've turned away from the recurrence triggers and looking to configure a cloud automated flow but that is where I am stuck. The only other Sharepoint trigger I can see is "For a Selected Item" and for this action I cannot configure a filter. Thus for the next step, I tried to add a "Get Items" action and I am running into another blocker where I cannot filter for dynamic content of the list that I selected. I am limited to the following dynamic content, when I am looking to filter for the date column in my list. As you can see from the screenshot there is no option for "See more" in dynamic content 

Here is my current flow: 

[wskinnermctc]

Might seem basic, but I would just add another 1 or 2 columns to the SharePoint list and call it something like "ApprovalStartDateTime" and/or "ApprovalStatus"

Then when the approval is started, you can Update Item in the "ApprovalStartDateTime" with the current time and also change "ApprovalStatus" to something like 'Initiated' or whatever.

Then on your recurring flow, you just filter out the items that already have a datetime in the "ApprovalStartDateTime" so that it won't be triggered again.

Does that seem like something you could incorporate? 

[Anonymous]

@wskinnermctc giving it a shot! Thanks for the feedback, was thinking something along these lines but had trouble trying to figure out how to trigger the column update from the approval 

As for the filter, that would be a condition in my flow to be placed before "Start and wait for an approval" right? 

[wskinnermctc · Accepted solution]

You have multiple options for how to filter/select the items to get only the ones that need approval. (Assuming you add some additional columns to the SharePoint list.)

You can add filters directly into the Get Items action in the Filter Query field. So it could be something like: ApprovalStatus ne 'Initiated' Or ApprovalStartDateTime eq null

Which is saying, If the column "ApprovalStatus" is not equal to 'Initiated' OR the column "ApprovalStartDateTime" is equal null then get the items.

The alternative you are correct about, which would be to put a Condition control after the Get Items and use that within an Apply to Each to determine if the item should initiate an approval or not. 

[Anonymous]

@wskinnermctc I now have the approval responses routing to SP list and I tried a "Do Until" action until my column contains Response Comments however the approval is still kicking off - let me try some of that filtering - thanks for the quick responses

[wskinnermctc]

Do Until is not used like that.

Do Until is a self contained loop. (It is not much different than Apply to Each.) The Do Until is usually used for continually apply actions to something until a result is achieve. Like increment a variable until the variable reaches 10. That would be 10 Do Until loops until it added to the variable. (Vague explanation of Do Until, but it doesn't really matter. You don't need to use it in this flow.)

[Anonymous]

@wskinnermctc thanks for saving me the time and for the brief explanation!

[Anonymous]

@wskinnermctc Are you able to identify what could be going wrong here?

Here is my filter for Get Items and it is pointing to the correct list: 

Here is my column showing null (line item in Grey): 

Confirmation of Column name: 

Upon testing it doesn't kick off the approval based on the null value 

[Anonymous]

@wskinnermctc got something working! not exactly what I initially had in mine but it works! thank you for your help