Concurrent approval requests not working

[phil_]

Hi,

I'm hoping I'm not doing something completely stupid, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting my flow to send approvals requests to multiple approvers simultaneously.  It goes to the first approver OK, but the second approver doesn't receive the request until the first approver has responded.

A bit of background...

I'm obtaining my list of approvers from a SharePoint list.  This bit is definitely working as the debugging shows the values.  I am then putting the email addresses of the approvers into a string variable with a semi-colon separator.  This too is working.

The 'Apply to each' has concurrency enabled with a Degree of Parallelism set to 1.

Now, if I select the action 'Send an email' it sends an email to both approvers at the same time - then the flow completes successfully.  If I add the action 'Start and wait for an approval' (approval type Approve/Reject - first to respond) it sends this to the first approver then does nothing until that approver has approved or rejected the request.  As soon as they do, the approval then fires to the second approver.  This is no good since the first approver may be on annual leave etc.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

[JohnAageAnderse]

Hello @phil_ 

You are nearly there 🙂 Make your variable an Array and in the Apply to each loop use an Append ... action to add the approvers email addresses to the variable.

After the Apply to each loop, place your Start and wait for an approval action there. This will ensure only one approval request is sent, but to both your approvers!

Hope this helps you on the way 🙂 Kind regards, John

[JohnAageAnderse]

Ps. I always uses Array variables to collect email addresses, but you can use your String variable, just use an Append ... to string .. action instead of Set action.

As I use an Array, I then use a join(my variable, ';') expression in the Assigned to field 😉

[phil_]

Hi John,

Thanks for the quick response.  I have followed your suggestion regarding the array variable but it still works in the same way - i.e. it sends to the first approver then onto the next but only after the first has responded.  It now looks like this:

As you can see, I've followed your suggestion about joining the variables.  It's frustrating that it does obtain the values correctly, it just doesn't work as expected.

Have I got the approval part in the right place?  I've tried to move it outside the scope of the 'Apply to each' function but it complains (I forget what error it gave).

Any ideas what it could be, or if there's any links to how to set this up another way?

Thanks

Phil

[JohnAageAnderse · Accepted solution]

Hello @phil_ 

You have to move the Start and wait for an approval action after your Apply to each action. 🙂
Kind regards, John

[ScottShearer]

@phil_ 

In your original post, you say that you have concurrency on and set to 1 - that means that loops will run sequentially.  If you want them to run concurrently, set the value up to something like 10.  That means that you can have up to 10 approvals running concurrently.

[phil_]

I'm 100% sure (but obviously not really) I had already tried all of this (apart from the join bit).

IT WORKS!

Thank you so much @JohnAageAnderse !

Thanks for the suggestion @ScottShearer and I will bear that in mind when I do some testing with more approvers.

Have a great weekend guys!