Flow that Loops through a Library and Sends Approvals on multiple rows if the Conditions are Met

[Christina1]

Hello Power Automate Community,

I am trying to create a Flow that will run through my library and look for certain conditions to be met. Once those conditions are met, I want it to Start an Approval for each row that has matched the condition and send notifications to the Approvers all at once. Right now, my flow will only match on one row at a time and it won't move to the second approval until the first / prior has been responded to. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[ScottShearer]

@Christina1 

Please post a screen shot of your Flow.

Can you tell me about how many documents you have and about how many approvals will be generated?

Also, is this a one time thing or will you need to do this again? 

One way to approach  this might be to add a text column to the library - let's call it Approval.

Write a Flow that loops through the library and finds that documents that require approval.  For these documents set the Approval column to "Approval Required"

Write another Flow and use a "When an item or file is modified" trigger.  If the Approval column is set to "Approval required", set the Approval column to something else and start your approval.

This approach will allow for an individual Flow run for each approval so that each will run currently.

There are other approaches that you can take as well.

[Christina1]

Hi @ScottShearer ,

Thank you for your response! I have included a screenshot of my flow. I will actually be running this flow (and I will create very similar ones for different libraries) once a year for a recertification process that we run to ensure that our procedure documents are accurate for the given calendar year. 

We have multiple libraries that have a varying amount of documents. The least would be about 10 documents and the most would be about 200 or 300 max.

Approvals will be generated for each document in the library so it could be up to about 300 notifications. 

The flow will be manually triggered each year, once our teams are ready to recertify their documents. I created a "recertified" column to act as the "approval" column that you mentioned. The flow will trigger if the "status" of the document is anything but retired and the "recertified" column is set to No. 

The problem that I have is that when the flow runs, once it finds the first row that matches my conditions, it will pause until that approval is responded to and then will move to the next matching row (so on and so forth). I need it to run through and apply to all of the matching rows all at once instead of one at a time.

Any ideas?

[ScottShearer]

@Christina1 

Divide your Flow into two separate Flows as I mentioned in my earlier response.

Change your existing Flow to update a new column called "Approval" (you can use a different name) and set the column to "Approval Required"

Remove the approval from your Flow

Create a new Flow that runs on change - if "Approval" is equal to "Approval Required", start an approval and set the "Approval" column to something else.  You could use a trigger filter here as well.

Let me know you you need an example.

[Christina1]

Hi @ScottShearer ,

Could you please provide an example? I am also not sure how to set a column to "Approval Required". Do you just mean to create a choice in the Approval column that is called "Approval Required"?