Trigger For Sending An Approval

[ohanoch]

Hi all,

I am new to Power Automate (actually new to most MS enterprise apps) and think I am having a very basic misunderstanding.

My Goal

I am trying to create a flow that triggers when someone sends an approval request (through the Approvals app) and then after the request has been responded to (accepted or rejected or something else) it does an action, like send an email or do something else.

The Problem

It appears that the Approvals app only has actions and no triggers.
The closest thing I found was to create a form that collects the data for the approval request and then use the Approval action of created an approval and continuing from there. This seems very backwards to me.
It seems to me that using Forms to initiate the process makes it a lot more difficult (if not impossible) to preserve all the features that exist when creating an approval request directly + I just seems unnecessarily complicated to me to need to do this workaround.
I am sure there is a very basic reason to why Approvals do not have triggers and will be happy to learn why.

What I tried

I looked through all the available premade connects and didn't find one that fits my needs (as Approvals do not have triggers).

I tried looking at the Approvals app through MS Teams but it seems very limited in options outside of simply sending and receiving requests. There is an option to use Adobe Sign that I see, so maybe there is a way to add another 3rd party extension to send an email or do other things but I am not sure how.
I tried making my a Business Process Flow but got completely lost.
I watched some youtube videos and googled around, looked around in this forum, but didn't find anyone asking specifically about Approval triggers.

Summary

I want to do something that seems to be simple but I can't figure out. The fact that I don't see other posts about this make me think that I have a very basic misunderstanding.
At the end of the day I will be happy to learn why something that seems so much simpler than all the other complicated things I see around is not possible. What am I misunderstanding about the system?
I would also be happy to learn how I should be doing this properly or if there are any workarounds to this.

Thank you in advance for your time and help!

[v-xiaochen-msft]

Hi @ohanoch ,

Acutally, there are two solutions to meet your needs.

1\ Use Wait for an approval action or Start and wait for an approval action. Flow actions which are afthe this action will not continue until the manager completes the approval.

2\ After manager's approval, the data will be saved in the Approval Responses table in the dataverse, so you can use the trigger.

Best Regards,

Wearsky

[ohanoch]

Thank you Wearsky for your reply!

I see that you are using a "Manual trigger a flow" to start a procedure. I tried doing that but then I can't ask the user to enter the Approval request details.

My problem is that I can't figure out how to start the process from an approval being requested. Sending the email once the Approval gets an answer is the part that I do understand. 

So in total the workflow I want is:
- User manually creates an approval and enters the details they want.

- Approval gets answered (accepted or rejected)

- Email gets sent automatically with results to the requester

Is this possible? Is there a way to have the user enter the Approval details using the Manual Trigger that you used?

[v-xiaochen-msft]

Hi @ohanoch ,

You could add some inputs for this flow/trigger. 

Best Regards,

Wearsky

[ohanoch]

Thans @v-xiaochen-msft .
Theoretically I could do the same using forms as well (which do have triggers). The problem with this is that I los a lot of the features of submitting an approval directly. 

One notable thing that wouldn't happen is when entering the "Assigned to" in this way and forwarding to to the Approval action is that it will not automatically search for the user in my corporation and help me find them while I type. This will lead to spelling mistakes when people enter it in a pure text input field which can cause problems.

Other features I lose are the ability to decide if I want multiple approvers or not, and how many need to approve (all of them or just one). In general I will lose any built in features that make Approvals so appealing.

So I am trying to avoid this kind of a solution for these reasons.

[ianwuk]

@ohanoch did you figure this out?

I want to do something similar, approval is submitted, add data to a row in Excel. 

It's crazy that the Approvals app has no triggers.  I really hope MS changes this.

[ohanoch]

Hi @ianwuk ,

I honestly don't remember what I ended up doing. The quick answer I am sure of is - I did not get a way around that will let me do this like I wanted.

I think I ended up compromising and using MS Forms to collect data (and thus using the MS forms trigger) and then forwarding it to an approval process in the flow.

Nowadays I am more knowledgeable about PowerApps and I tend to build them to collect data from users - this is needlessly convoluted but it does provide a solution to collecting the data we want in the way we want it and then forwarding it to a flow.

Sorry I am not more helpful, this is indeed a frustrating problem.

[ianwuk]

@ohanoch  Thank you very much for taking the time to reply.  I appreciate it.  I also thought about using Forms to capture the data.  But that seems a needless step?  I'm also trying to learn Power Apps too, same as you.

[ohanoch]

@ianwuk Forms is indeed a needless step. Even worse, like I mentioned above it doesn't necessarily let you capture all the data you want, or put in the fields you want (like for example a user name field that auto completes). This is the advantage PowerApps have - essentially you can replicate the Approvals interface and then use that to trigger a flow that does what you want with the Approval.

So depending on what you need Forms may be able to work around your needs and you can save yourself the pain of creating a PowerApp.

In either case this is way too convoluted for what it needs to be, but its the best I can figure out at the moment.