How to send approval email for time off to supervisor?

[jyost]

We have two lists, TimeOffRequests and Employees. The TimeOffReqeust form has a Person field to select who is requesting time off. The Employee list has a column called Supervisor which is also a person.

When the employee complestes a new TimeOffReqeust in Sharepoint we want to send an approval email to his or her Supervisor.

Sounds simple but we have tried diong this several ways and none of them have resulted in a working flow...

1) Step 1) get the Employee's Supervisor from the Employee list by filtering on the Employee. We tried this but we cannot build a filter expression that is accepted. We can't use Name eq Name becuase (left side is from the Employee list and the right side is from the TimeOffRequest item) because Name or Name ID is not available in the dynamic content pulled from Sharepoint. We tried filtering by Email but then we get an error that "Name.Email", "Name/Email", and "Name\Email" don't exist as a column in Employees.

2) We pulled all Employees and tried to apply a condition to each item returned (each Employee) to send an email when the Employee's Email (or DisplayName) match the item's "Name Email" or "Name DisplayName". But the problem here is that you can't send an approval email inside of a foreach that you're using to find which Employee matched the Employee who created the item.

Anyone else have any ideas here? Seems like a pretty simple flow but there appears to be too many subtle features missing like the ability to filter on Name.ID or the ability to take the first element from the results of a conditional match to send an approval email to.

[v-yamao-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi Jyost,

I try to create a flow to achieve what you want, but it seems that I got the same results with you.

Is the supervisor a Manager? If yes, please consider to use the action “Get Manager” in your flow:

Best regards,
Mabel Mao

[jyost]

Hi Mabel,

Yes! I used the Get Manager step that you mentioned and it's working! Thank you so much for that suggestion. I struggled trying to get this to work by adding the Employee's supervisor to the list and several other approaches. Unfortunately it seems that referncing other lists is currently difficult to do in Flow. But, thankfully we use Office 365 and it's Exchange service so I was able to assign everyone's Manager in Exchange and the flow was able to pull the manager and send the approval to them inside of Flow with no additional issues.

Thanks again!

John

[v-yamao-msft]

Hi Jyost,

I am glad to hear that my suggestion works for you.

Any time you got issues when work with Microsoft Flow, welcome post your issues here, we are always ready to help.

Best regards,
Mabel Mao