How to send multiple approvals to different people at once (more than 100 at once)?

[Oskarkuus]

I have a flow that is scheduled to run each day.

It checks a large sharepoint list. If a value i strue the flow is suppose to send a approval to the persons mentioned on the specific row.

some days the flow can find nothing and no approvals are sent out.

other days there are 10 and other days there can be 100 approvals that need to be sent out.

my flow is roughly built like this.

EACH DAY > GET ITEMS (filter on specific value) > FOR EACH row in SP list found, send approval.

I have configured the FOR EACH step with Concurrency Control at 50 rows at once. But 50 is not enough, some days many will not be sent since the flow will wait for other approvals to finish before it starts doing 51, 52 and so on....

Is there some way to increas the Concurrency Control?

I have been thinking about adding another column in the list stating the status so i can do multiple checks each day... but i really do not want to have to do this.

Looking for other ideas

[grantjenkins]

A few questions.

1. Approx. how many items are in your SharePoint List (total number of items)?
2. What happens in the flow logic when people response to the Approval?

One option is to have a flow that runs on a schedule (once a day at a particular time). This flow gets the results based on your filter (your filter value is true) and then calls a child flow for each result (person). It would pass in the relevant details from the scheduled flow to the child flow (person object, etc.).

This would mean there would be potentially 100 flows running (one for each person) with the Approval action and any further logic you want once they respond to the Approval.

You would end up building two flows.

1. Scheduled flow that gets the data and calls the child flow passing in relevant details
2. Child flow (HTTP trigger) that handles the approval and any flow logic after getting a response

This would fix your concurrency issue, and much better than having ~100 people assigned to a single Approval action in a single flow.

On a sidenote: It seems like an interesting solution sending out so many approvals. What do you do when people don't approve after a certain period of time? I can imagine there would be people ending up with multiple approvals if they potentially get a new approval each day. Maybe there would be a better way to approach what you're trying to achieve.

[Oskarkuus]

I have now changed the flow so it do have a child-flow.

EACH DAY > GET ITEMS (filter on specific value) > FOR EACH row in SP list found, TRIGGER CHILD-FLOW.

Child Flow have : START AND WAIT FOR APPROVAL

main flow scheduled:

child flow:

But this wont work since the for each wont go over 50, it waits for child flows to finish before it moves on to next one. so i do not gain anything from having a childflow.

i wold as you say rather have it just mass-start 1 or 200 separate flow instances at once, but that does not seem to be possible to build. Tho i need to think about the flow limit that one user can trigger, 250.

so i am back to thinking about the solution of adding a value to rows that do have an active approval.

this way i can trigger the main flow several times... but i then want to trigger the flow for example at 03.00 and at 03.15 and at 03.30 and at 03.45

but afaik i can not trigger a flow  several times a day like this, within the same hour... so that mean i need 4 flows that trigger once at these hours and then trigger the main flow that trigger the child flow... it went quick frome one flow to handle this to no 6 😄

the main issue is still tho, i do need to make sure the flow is sending out all approvals... most of the time it will be enough to handle 50 at once, but i know i will be getting problems with this some days. I have so many possible receivers of the flow so it is not very likely one person will be getting more than one per day... and i am not worried about how many rows my sharepoint list contains, i am not close to any thresholds.

[Oskarkuus]

Another idea could be to do this:

MAIN flow triggers once per day.

Identify for example 150 rows that now needs an approval.

Write in a column in my main SP list "approval pending"

Then write 150 new rows to a new sharepoint list with all information that is needed to handle the approvals.

-

Then i create a new flow that triggers at each new row created in the new shrepoint list.

This flow starts and wait for approval. I can not think of any limitations here that would stop the 150 flows to start and trigger 150 approvals almost at once.

When a person is acting on the approval and send in an answer.

The row in the new sharepoint list should be deleted. The corresponding row in the Main list now get the value "approval pending" updated to blank.

This way the new list is a way to keep track of all outstanding approvals. If an approval timeout (30 days), i can also act on that and update the value in the main list to "approval timeout" and keep the row in the new list to send out another approval request for that specific row that have timed out and if that is answered, then it is handled as a normal answer.

on paper it sounds nice, i get more details and control... but i do need another list and a column in my main list that i actually dont want 😄

[grantjenkins]

In relation to the limits of how many flows a single user can create and run. It depends on the Flow license of the user. If you have Power Automate per user plan, you can create and run an unlimited number of flows.

This is in accordance with the Power Platform Licensing Guide as of June 2022.

https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=2085130&clcid=0x409

Note that the link above downloads the latest Licencing Guide from Microsoft.

Note however that you may still reach other limits so important to understand them all. I have difficulty trying to understand the limits as hard to find and often change over time.

Just a few questions?

• How many items are in your list?
• How many items to you expect over the next year?
• Is there a particular reason people have to approve so often?
• Are you able to articulate the problem you're trying to resolve? Maybe there is a better way that sending out so many approvals.

In relation to calling Child flows and the Parent flow having to wait. You can get around this by returning a response instantly from the Child flow so the Parent flow can continue calling more Child flows, and once it's called the last Child flow it will complete. Note that I generally have the response action on a parallel branch since it's not part of my actual flow logic., so like to keep it separate.

It's also worth noting that some of the actions below are Premium.

See example below.

Main Flow (Schedule in this example).

Child Flow

[Oskarkuus]

Just a few questions?

• How many items are in your list?

At a max i estimate the list to contain about 2000 rows.

• How many items to you expect over the next year?

I dont expect the list to grow out of hand, it have a cycle that keeps it kind of clean...

• Is there a particular reason people have to approve so often?

It is not that often different people need to approve. I just know that a few times during a full year there will be peaks where allot will happen at once. So i need to design the solution to work during a extreme peak.

• Are you able to articulate the problem you're trying to resolve? Maybe there is a better way that sending out so many approvals.

I have a list. People add there own rows to the list with information. Each row have a lifespan (date) that depends on the data stored in the record. When a rows lifespan near its ending, the rows owner/creator need to act on if the date should be extended or not, this is where i use the approval.

[grantjenkins]

I'll create a full example with a list and get items from schedule flow and calling child flow.

Just a couple more questions:

1. Does each list item only contain a single owner? Just that I saw in your original screenshot you were in an Apply to each loop and had a Parse JSON action to Get Owners which indicated more than one.
2. If the owner approves, do you just add a standard duration to the item (say add 1 year) or something like that?
3. What happens to the list item if they don't approve?
4. Does your Approval just have the standard Approve and Reject options or do you have custom options?

[takolota]

@Oskarkuus @grantjenkins 

I think you both may be missing a simpler answer.

Why not use the Chunk( ) expression on the SharePoint outputs to break it into an array of arrays of potential approval items?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/workflow-definition-language-functions-reference#...

From there you can start an outer loop that references the Chunks or the array of arrays of Approval items.

And you can then add an additional inner Apply to each that references the current item or the current array chunk.

Then you can set the Start and wait for approval action in that inner array with the current item of the inner loop (the current SharePoint item).

That way, you have a loop that can concurrently run 50 instances of Start and wait for approval within another loop that can run 50 instances of that 50 instance loop or 50 * 50 = 2500 Approvals at once.

[grantjenkins]

I'd much prefer the parent/child flow option.

Logically these approvals aren't related so having a separate flow run for each approval makes sense, and easy to create and manage. You're only creating two flows.

It also allows you to add fields on the Flow run area using the schema of the child flow trigger so you can see which run relates to which person easily.

Additionally, having separate flows will allow you to potentially timeout the approval after say 28 days, set the initial approval to expired/cancelled (update approval in Dataverse), then recall the child flow so you get another 28 days, and so on.

If all bundled up into a single flow and the flow has an issue, it affects all running approvals in that flow. With a single flow for each approval, it would be isolated to just that flow, etc.

I personally see loops within loops within loops as difficult to manage and understand who has/hasn't completed their approvals.

Remember, if you have at least a Power Automate per user plan then you can create/run an unlimited number of flows.

Anyway - I'll create a full example to show how it would work end to end.

[Oskarkuus]

I solved this at the by following the tip of adding a respond to powerapps or flow direct in the child flow.

All replies have helped. This have been a good training scenario for me to work with! 

[grantjenkins]

Nice.

Yea that's what I always do when calling child flows. I generally put it as the first action and add it to a parallel branch so it's not part of the main logic of the flow.

I actually had that in one of my screenshots 🙂