Track Approval Status for "Everyone Required"

[andrewraia]

Good Morning All,

I have a flow that collects user emails from a list column and sends an approval to all those users. The approval requires approval from everyone for the overal approval to succeed. Is there a way to track individual responses to see who might be hold up the approval if they did not reply? My Flow looks something like this...

Initialize a variable

For each person in the approvers column, append the users email

Start and wait for an approval (v2) - assigned to everyone in the approvers variable

[somewhere in here I need to track individual responses)

if responses do not contain approve then update status to rejected else update status to approved.

[ScottShearer]

@andrewraia 

I am not aware of any way to achieve your goal when using a single approval action.  An alternative might be to use parallel approvals.  However, it sounds like your number of approvers can vary so that may not work for you.

[andrewraia]

@ScottShearer Correct, the number of approvers will vary. I guess I COULD create a flow that just has the approval action in it and call that flow from a loop in my main flow, but that seems like a lot of extra work.

[ScottShearer]

@andrewraia 

You are correct - that would get ugly.....

[Brad_Groux]

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@andrewraia wrote:

@ScottShearer Correct, the number of approvers will vary. I guess I COULD create a flow that just has the approval action in it and call that flow from a loop in my main flow, but that seems like a lot of extra work.

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I have done this successfully, I've even built hybrid flows utlizing my own "approval" steps based upon a SharePoint column input (example: submitted, under review, rejected, more information needed, initial review, peer review, engineer review, etc.).

But for most of my Approval Flows using the Create an approval flow that requires everyone to approve documentation or the Manage sequential approvals with Microsoft Flow documentation covers the vast majority of my needs.

If this reply has answered your question or solved your issue, please mark this question as answered. Answered questions helps users in the future who may have the same issue or question quickly find a resolution via search. If you liked my response, please consider giving it a thumbs up. THANKS!

[andrewraia]

@Brad_Groux I have the workflow working fine, the issue is I can't track individual replies, I have the responses recorded after the fine approval is rejected or approved, but if I have 4 users that are required and 3 approved and 1 did not reply, I can't keep track of who is outstanding to followup with them.

[Brad_Groux]

Have you thought of using a SharePoint list to track the responses? When an item is approved, add an entry to a SharePoint list. 

If this reply has answered your question or solved your issue, please mark this question as answered. Answered questions helps users in the future who may have the same issue or question quickly find a resolution via search. If you liked my response, please consider giving it a thumbs up. THANKS!

[andrewraia]

Yes but the issue is that approval step does not let you loop through each response, the approval is collectively either approved or rejected, and I AM tracking that, but I can't tell who rejected or approved until AFTER all responses are collected.

[Brad_Groux]

This is why I mentioned using a hybrid approval in my first response above. You can still use the "approval bits" to process the approvals, but you can also build upon those bits by adding your own approval status column(s), and just comparing the current status via an expression.

We trigger the approval steps with the conditional expressions, not with the users themselves. Example: If status column = Approved, then send approval email. In this step, you could also add the update step for a SharePoint list to include the approver or rejecter.

If this reply has answered your question or solved your issue, please mark this question as answered. Answered questions helps users in the future who may have the same issue or question quickly find a resolution via search. If you liked my response, please consider giving it a thumbs up. THANKS!

[andrewraia]

Yea i think we are slightly crossing wires or I am not understanding. I THINK what you are saying and what I want to avoid, is creating a flow JUST for the approval step, and then calling that flow from the main flow and passing variables into the approval flow based on the data coming from my main flow, then each time it calls the approval flow I Can process the responses individually. I get it, it works, but its messy lol.

[v-lin-msft]

Hi @andrewraia,

According to your description of your flow and analysis of your issue, the number of approvers will vary, and you want to track individual responses who might be hold up the approval if they did not reply.

I'm not sure where your Approver Email address is stored, but since it's dynamic, I suggest you store them in a SharePoint list. You can create a list just like this screenshot:You should create a column to record to status of approve named "Approve" or "Reply", you can also create more column to record your approve status, just like approved or rejected, comment, etc.

Then, you can create a flow according to these following screenshots.

Step1: Get Email list from your SharePoint, Initialize variables "ApproveCount" and "TotalApprovesStatus".

Step2: Create a Apply to each action, and put actions Approval, Update item, condition. The detail of configuration as below.

Step3: After action of Apply to each, create a condition to judge "Approve Count" whether is not equals to 0,

If yes, set variable TotalApproveSatus as Approve;

If no, do nothing.

When one person replies for approval and the other does not, the following results are displayed and you can view the responses in SharePoint's list, just like this:

Please have a try with it and hope it will help you.

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _ Lin Tu

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[andrewraia]

@v-lin-msft I got emails of your replies but the posts appear to be gone so I can't see the screen shots 😕

[v-lin-msft]

Hello @andrewraia,

The previous answer was deleted by the system by mistake. I send it again.

According to your description of your flow and analysis of your issue, the number of approvers will vary, and you want to track individual responses who might be hold up the approval if they did not reply.

I'm not sure where your Approver Email address is stored, but since it's dynamic, I suggest you store them in a SharePoint list. You can create a list just like this screenshot:You should create a column to record to status of approve named "Approve" or "Reply", you can also create more column to record your approve status, just like approved or rejected, comment, etc.

Then, you can create a flow according to these following screenshots.

Step1: Get Email list from your SharePoint, Initialize variables "ApproveCount" and "TotalApprovesStatus".

Step2: Create a Apply to each action, and put actions Approval, Update item, condition. The detail of configuration as below.

Step3: After action of Apply to each, create a condition to judge "Approve Count" whether is not equals to 0,

If yes, set variable TotalApproveSatus as Approve;

If no, do nothing.

When one person replies for approval and the other does not, the following results are displayed and you can view the responses in SharePoint's list, just like this:

Please have a try with it and hope it will help you.

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _ Lin Tu

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[prasbala]

@v-lin-msft 

Thanks for the solution. This is exactly something that i was looking for, and works perfectly. 

[zbean]

But, is there a way to see approval status for a "start and wait" if you have numerous users or you are targeting a AD group?  The results of this step are not shown until its finished.  I know there is talk of each approval being sent to the CDS, but it seems a bit much to query the CDS approval entities as well as user entities and then concatenate the results.  Would be ideal to see the completed actions within the running flow with live updates.

[Mtodd23]

What approval type is used for "Start and wait for an approval"?