Timeouts for Reviews

[n1112997NX]

Hi.

We have a document review flow to get documents approved by various people in our organisation.  Like many of these flows once the approval gets ignored it eventually is forgotten or times out.

To counter that I have set a do until loop with a variable that is updated on completion of the approval or should timeout and restart another approval after 7 days.  See below.

 In testing (if you change the 7 days to a minute) the process works like a charm.  However, if you have the timeout as anything over 24 hours then the flow doesn't restart the approval but just fails.  This is really irritating as 1) the process stops altogether 2) It takes at least a day to test everytime!

Does anyoe have any ideas why the longer timeout doesn't work as the shorter one does?  Any sniff of an idea would be welcome as I'm completely out!

Many thanks. 

[David_MA · Accepted solution]

You need to update the timeout limits on your Do Until action as well. By default, that times out after one hour. Although, I don't really understand why you are restarting the approval. When you restart it, do you send it to someone different? Or are you really looking for a way to send a reminder so the person assigned the approval completes it?

[n1112997NX]

Many thanks- will try that.    

With regards to the approvals it was designed to go to the same person. 

Have you found any more elegent solution because I agree it seems a bit clumsy?

[David_MA]

Yes, I just use the one approval. Instead, I send the person a reminder message that they have a pending approval. Here is an example of how I do this:

• In the above, from the Run a Child Flow up are different utility steps to create variables and other things such as sending the requester a confirmation that their request was received and has been sent for approval. Where the parallel branch is, on the left are the actions handling the approvals. On the right sends a reminder message that an approval is pending. 
• In the Do until side, it runs until an Approval Completed variable (Boolean with a default of false) is true.
• I send the reminder every two days. Since workflows timeout after 28 days, this allows me to send 14 reminder messages, which is what I have set for the timeout limit in the Do until action.
• Since I don't want to send a reminder as soon as the approval is sent, the first action in the Do until is a Delay for 48 hours (of course you can adjust this to your needs, but be sure to update the timeout to an equal amount or you could set the Timeout instead of using a count.
• The condition checks to see the Approval Completed variable is true before it sends a reminder. If it is not, it sends the person a reminder e-mail that includes link to the environment's received approvals (https://make.powerautomate.com/environments/{environment_id}/approvals/received).
• On the approval side, once the approval has been completed I set the Approval Completed variable to True and at the end Terminate the workflow with Succeed. This just ends the workflow so it doesn't keep running while it waits to do another check to see if a reminder needs to be sent.

[n1112997NX]

Thanks for that.  That is a more elegent solution.  I've not really embraced used parallel tasks much except for error handling.  

WIll have a play this afternoon.  Thanks again. 👍