Power Automate: Start and Wait for an Approval

hey everyone this is daniel and in today's video we're gonna deep dive into the power automate start and wait for an approval and we're gonna use sharepoint as the backend data source that triggers the flow but first here's my intro video [Music] [Music] so as i deep dive into this video the five key things that i want to focus on are over here and they are the approval types the details which is basically the subject or the body of the email the attachment links response option times and simultaneously and what that simultaneously means i'll explain that to you in a little bit over here so that's basically the five things now let's jump into the demo now one of the things which i want to first focus on quickly is the sharepoint list which is in the back end so this is a list this is not a document library okay this is a list and what we'll do is we'll go ahead and take at the settings over here and i go into the list settings and here are basically the column types the title is there by default the modified and created are the ones which are automatically created by sharepoint so you don't have to do that and then there is the approvers the approvers is a person or group and then there's a comments and rejected and these are again multiple lines of text for the approvals though i want to show you that over here i've selected a allow multiple selections and the reason i'm doing the allow multiple selections so that i can add multiple approvers over there and then we'll be able to capture that through the flow and the sharepoint all right so that was the key thing over here on the sharepoint list side i'm using sharepoint as a backend database uh which is important because there's so much more that comes along with it however i don't want to emphasize too much on that because this is basically all that it is it's just the sharepoint list and the id column is the one which is automatically created by sharepoint so again nothing to be too focused on now one thing i'm going to show you as a trick later on is this title column it by default goes ahead and makes it as a required one and i'll go ahead and make it unrequired because that will save you a step and potentially a lot of heartache in the flow set i'll explain that to you when we get over there so let's go and start building the flow all right so i'm going to come over here now i'm going to create a new flow um i'm going to go ahead and say yep this is an automated cloud flow my trigger is going to be sharepoint when a new item is created and i'm going to call this as a demo for um wait for response okay i'm going to create that and you can also skip it over here and skip that there you can come back over here and just you know file the information but that's the easy part i want to focus on that i want to focus on the fun part all right so when a new item is created again that's what we did as a trigger i come over here now and i go and select my site address my site address is the poc one which i've used for so many examples and then i go ahead and come and pick up my sharepoint uh the list name which in here was called as concurrent approval steps so i go ahead and call that and now we've at least gone and taken care of the trigger piece nothing else that has to be done what i'm gonna do next is i'm gonna go ahead and now initialize a few variables and there's actually four different types of variables i'm going to go ahead and initialize the first ones i want to go and take care of is the links now i do want to pause and talk over here for a second is that why in this video i'm focusing on links um and i'm not going to show you if actually attach the attachment like the word doc powerpoint whatever attach it to the email or the notifications going on the reason i prefer links is first of all a specific scenario when the emails are going to your internal company employees the employees which will have access to that sharepoint list or or you know wherever the document is getting saved the reason i do that is because then attachments don't go flying around in your emails because that can cause a lot of load on your emails over there but a big problem is that it can also go ahead and cause uh you know potential copyrights issues or potential data which is your data getting lost if it goes ahead and gets sent outside your company so that can be a problem over there which is why i personally as long as i know that this flow is going to be inside the company use links a lot because if a person doesn't have access to that data over there or that link even though if the email was forwarded to somebody who was not part of this project or flow whatever if the email was forwarded to them they don't have access to the list so you're still secure and still safe over there so that's that's one of the reasons why i'm not showing it over here but in general as long as it's inside the company i just don't use attachments i use links over here all right so that is why i'm using the links now i'm going to go ahead and start creating some of these variables so actually there's four so let's go ahead and generate those really fast i'm going to go and do the increment variable and there's four over here so the first one i'm going to do is just not increment did i use increment i wanted to use initialize so i come back over here i just search for var and then you can click on variable so you can go and select over here uh neat thing is if you select that variable then the search which you do over here now is only searching inside so right now if i just do initialize it picks that up so there's you know pros and cons for doing either one of them so i'm going to come over here and i'm going to say the initialize attachment link attach it the name is going to be attachment url bar and i'm going to just call this as initialize the attachment link and i'm going to call that as a string and that's that next go ahead and do another one of those is i'll just go ahead and call that as variable now i know what it is i'm just going to go and say initialize variable next one is for the initialize the name because we got the attachment name um an attachment link i'm going to get the attachment name again it is the link um it's the string go ahead and put the name over there uh name i'm going to call that as the attachment name bar now two more that i want to go ahead and do and that is called to initialize the approvers and those that are rejected now the reason i want to do that is because the they're going to talk about the um you know the sending using the approval thing and the neat thing about the approval thing uh approval you know process or the the step over there is it has the functionality to get catch a lot of metadata as well because when you're going and approving it will give you the options to go and say hey are you approaching a rejected well you can capture that what did the user reject and there's other metadata over there like the comments you can go and capture that as well so that's why i'm going ahead and going to use some of these variables over there to capture that information and in this case specifically who did what who went and uprooted who entered and captured it that's my focus over here so now the next two variables is specifically to do that is that who are the ones who went and uprooted and who are the ones who went ahead and rejected it so again i'm going to go ahead and go to variables and in the variables i'm going to go ahead and now initialize the variable it's going to be a string type and over here is going to be to approval bar initialize approvals next again variable initialize the variable initialize [Music] ejected rejected rejected var and string so we're doing good i'm just going to go ahead and save it now next let's go ahead and get the attachment that is put in because what i want to do is i'm going to put the links over there but in order to do that the when an item is created doesn't actually get me that information um so i need to use another step away and the step is to go ahead and get from sharepoint and sharepoint has something called as get attachments so you're going to type that sharepoint over here now i select sharepoint and here i just type in get now there is uh confusions over here so sometimes you use it is it the get item or get items or get attachment now i'm very specifically saying it is get attachments that's the one that you want to select over here and then for that you go ahead and again type go ahead and put the site address which in my case was the poc one the list one which is the exact same one where the data is getting saved and then you apply the id the id comes from the one where the item was created and that's as easy as that next we're going to go ahead and do another apply to each but here's what i'm using and apply to each but i'm not going to add and apply to each and here's here's how it makes it easier because if you go into and apply to each when i go and add actually the other steps over there it generates its own apply to each so that's why i say that don't put your apply to each first because it's going to generate that automatically so i'll show you what that mean all right so now that i've done the get attachments over here i'm going to now set the value of those variables so i'm going to come over here i'm going to go to variables i'm going to now set variable and the first variable that i'm going to set is the attachment name when i click over here we are going to go ahead and call the display name it's the get attachments and the display name and the moment i do that it automatically goes and puts it in the apply to each see kind of told you that because um if i go ahead and put the apply to each it goes ahead and puts in a second apply to each and then you gotta drag it and drop it and makes a whole bunch of chaos over there this is a very important thing for you to know because i know when you are viewing this video you're going to try to replicate exactly what you're seeing over there which means i bet the first time you will and accidentally put that applied to each and then you will go ahead and do the dragging inside of setting the variable and another apply to which will be added inside so don't do that listen to what i said first is that initially skip don't do this apply to each just go ahead and set the value to that variable it will automatically do the supply to each in fact it automatically goes and says the body over there it just makes your life a lot easier okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to give up rename this variable over here so i'm going to say the set attachment name variable and now if i go ahead and do the other one which is set the actual url as well it'll go ahead and take care of that so i come in i go ahead and set the url the url is called as absolute uri and now this is a question that i get asked is that um what is the difference between uri and url and you can read some heavy documentation on that but this is the best way that i understand it and you can explain that when literally in few sentence sentences is that the uri and url are almost the same except uri url if you click on it it takes you to a browser and it shows you that address of that link uri is different over the uri is also an address to a specific thing a data or a link or something but it's not something that you can view on the browser so that's kind of the big difference over there it'll still take you a link it is a link but it's not something that you use in the browser okay that's kind of the big difference between uri and url so hopefully that kind of helps them to an easier way for you to understand that so rename that and i'm going to call that as the set attachment url nice so we've taken care of the attachments piece over here now let's actually function on the real reason why we are here which is the approval ones so now i'm going to come over here we'll go to the approval and in the approval the ones that we are going to focus click on the approval the ones we're going to focus on is the stand and wait for an approval that's the whole reason why i'm doing this video over here now sorry don't stand i said stan said start and wait for an approval now in the start and wait for an approval there's a few different options available so let's actually take a look at those one is the approval type main thing the approval type and in the approval type if you notice all said and done and actually classifies into just two options there is the approve and reject and the custom responses so in the approve and reject again there's ways to go and say is everybody need to approve or as long as the first person approves and then the same thing in the custom responses there is does everybody need to respond or as long as one person responds over there the main difference between the approve and reject and the custom responses is pretty much exactly what the title says is that in the approve and reject it only gives you two options whether you want to approve it or you want to reject it and when that email notification comes to you there literally are just two buttons there's the approve and then there is the reject nothing else custom responses is pretty slick because that gives you the flexibility to add more buttons basically in your email notification that comes to you saying hey is it a approve or reject or is there an approve reject maybe or is there a you know maybe or need more information or reject you know gives you that flexibility and if you notice it gives you more than two flex uh options over there because it was just approve and reject and the customer and gives you more over this that's the big big difference over here so if i come over here and i would say custom responses so wait for all responses basically it goes ahead and gives me the option that here this is where you go ahead and start typing in the option to go ahead and say approve all right i'm going to say need more information now i will go and say reject let's make it easier and if you go ahead and click on this button over here it actually shows you how we can go ahead and put that in the code format as well right much easier the reason this is helpful is because we do have a few of them which you've got in a onenote somewhere you can just copy and paste that but after that everything is pretty much the same so in my title i'm going to say that your approval is required for say claim id and the id number i'll go ahead and grab that from the sharepoint side so items created do that assigned to now watch what's going to happen in the assigned to moment i put in assign to it is going to go and put that and then apply to each approve and that's that's a very important step now the reason the applied um multiple people are going to come in is because in the assigned to i've gone ahead and put in more people in the sharepoint list so if you don't remember that we come back to our sharepoint list we go into settings list settings over here and in the list settings for the approvers we went ahead and actually gave multiple allow multiple selections over here that that was the option shown up over here and i wanted to give that flexibility to the end users to do that so now watch what happens if i go over here now it's scrolling down scrolling down and if i go ahead and select the approvers emails watch what's going to happen it'll go with this and puts it into another apply to each so at this point it is a good idea to go ahead and actually name all of them so i say apply to each approver and then you can also go and save that that way because we're going to be leveraging these two in a few other steps and you want to know which applies which apply all right moving along so we did that and i'm going to go ahead and now say my links so in the links section i'm going to go ahead and put the first link is item link is actually going to be the attachments url and the item description is going to be the attachments name that's basically all i need over here that's the key thing isn't that now in the details in the details you can go and put in a lot of information but here's what i want to tell you details doesn't allow heavy rich text or html format what that means is that if you were to put in this link over there it will not show up as a url a button or you know a text with an underline it won't show that up it'll actually provide the entire link over there all right okay you don't trust me let's go and just put that in as it is over this one over here i'm putting that in the details i'm putting that in the link description you will see what happens over there and now let's just go and test this because what i've done is i've got gone ahead and put custom responses and i'm doing weight for all responses let's go and test that right this is actually a good time um to test it so i'll go ahead and say save and i'll come back over here i'm gonna put in a new item and a new item is i'm gonna say test number one and i'll put in two people i'll put in myself daniel i'll put in another employee and i'm going to go ahead and click on save so that went and went in over here you see we've got the approvers we've got that the id automatically got generated and now this thing should go ahead and kick off okay so it is going ahead and running so they're going to click on it it is running it's actually showing me the flow running and so far everything is good so let's take a look at it right this was all the initialized initialize that's nothing fancy where they initialized nothing fancy went ahead and grabbed the attachments i didn't put an attachment we'll test that later but over here now in the apply to each it is actually going ahead and waiting so what we'll do is we'll start actually getting two email notifications one email will come to me and the other email will go to gabriel so let's win watch over there all right so the first one came through remember it was the item number 15 that's why the claim id came over here and see voila right there are those three buttons that you got over here all right so i'm going to go ahead and click on approve and in the approve it gives me the option to go and put in the comments and in the comments i can say approved and please exper died the process click on submit that's what daniel said now because of the way that i've set it up right now in the flow until then unless daniel has approved it only then does gabriel get the approval because if you noticed gabriel and daniel didn't get it at the same time it does not by default go through simultaneously see now that you see that email notification has come to gabriel because daniel went ahead and approved it all right i'm gonna emphasize on that and over here again same thing so what i'll do is i'll go ahead and say reject this is not my employee i'll go ahead and click on submit so i kind of need you to understand that because even that's where the confusion is that in the apply to all and it is you know uh to the whole concept is to you know wait for an approval by default it does not go out concurrently or simultaneously to everybody it goes in a specific step of scenario and i've noticed one thing is specifically on the sharepoint set and i can prove that to you is that when i come over here on the sharepoint um the way it sends out is exactly the way i selected the approvers so if you noticed over here i went ahead and did that for daniel christian and gabriel christian which is why daniel got the email notification first for the approval after daniel approved it invented gabriel so let's actually do another test i'm going to go ahead and do now test number two this time i'll go and put in as gabriel first then i'll do daniel and now let's have some fun and just put some attachments as well 20 20 attachments uh achievements click on save it goes through remember to put gabriel first so if all my hypothesis is anyone can improve over here at 16 test number two which is what i typed in now gabriel's first and daniel ii so if my hypothesis is correct gabriel which is the uh for claim number 15 he his email will come through first over here right so let's watch aha this one came through over here claim number 16. wait let me just go check over there let's claim number 15. so we already did that so i don't have to worry about that let's go back over here um come back over here that's claim number 15 but does it make sense now and do you understand how that's working is it's all based on how you added that selection on the sharepoint site because before for claim number 15 daniel got the notification first but elijah i mean gabriel got it afterwards and now it's vice versa that's a little important tidbit that you need to understand over there so we'll go back over here now and i'm going to say that approve says yes approved gladly submit that goes through and then afterwards now you will see that a notification will come over here for the claim number 16 the second one because gabriel has gone ahead and approved it now it will come over here to daniel because i'm also on the approvers list so watch and there now i also got that approval over here and do you see what i meant over there in that detail section over there in the approval you it doesn't behave like a rich text over there and i proved it to you because right in the link section this thing works it works as a link but i took that exact same name remember that url variable that we created i put that over here in the details and it goes ahead and you know strips of the url and it just shows the url over here so just kind of keep that in mind because sometimes people treat that detail i mean this approval process as if it's an email that is getting sent to you yes it is an email that is sent to you but it is not like the outlook send email action this is an approvals action that's going over here and the approvals detail is not the same as your outlook emails subject body all right kind of keep that in mind it's not the same and i proved that here because it went ahead and stripped off the link and actually displayed the entire link over here which is why links are more useful and you want to put all the stuff in the links all right so let's continue now i've already shown you you know some really neat stuff but i want to finish off on the approval side so let's go back over here let's go in here and oh cool so it went ahead and completed both of them successfully well actually that one's still running because i um i think it's just pending something so let's go back in and i want to continue now um with two things first of all i want to go and save that data i want to show you how i can go ahead and save that data in a very nice and concise format because if you notice i want to save those comments over here so we can at least walk you through that piece over here all right so we did the write down to the apply to each and over here we're going to start back on the start and wait for the response approval now i want to spend a little bit of time over here before i go and show you the other stuff is the whole process of the start and wait for an approval um what we did was we went ahead and selected the approval tab which was the custom responses and we said the wait for all responses this over here the approve and reject uh approve and reject for everyone must approve is the exact same as the wait for all responses the only difference is we don't get these response option types we only go ahead and get the um the the options to go ahead and uh it's either going to be approved or it's going to be rejected that's all it shows over there all right so kind of keep that in mind and it's kind of interesting how this is showing that over here sometimes you kind of go ahead and have these issues over there so if it you know if it does go ahead and make a little hiccup over there you can always go ahead and delete this which is what i'll do i'll just go and delete it and we'll go ahead and add the new approval form process over here so i'll say the approvals and in the approvals i'm going to say start and wait for an approval and this one is now going to be is that everyone must approve now in the everyone must approve it's the same process as how we did for wait for all responses but what happens is it's what you just noticed over here is that when i went and selected gabriel first or elij or um daniel first it always goes and it does send it to everybody but it sends people in a simula in a consistent order it doesn't go ahead and send it to everybody simultaneously but there's a fix for that and the fixes basically you come over here on the top right you go ahead and select on the settings and then select actually it's not on that one over here you know i did that there's a trick for that and the trick is you go to the apply to each you don't do it on the set and wait for an approval you do it on the apply to each in the apply to each you go to settings and you turn on this little you know ray of sunshine which is currency control and it's by default it is off you can go and turn that on what concurrency does is that every other step in the applied to each those go ahead and run simultaneously and that's kind of very important over there for you to understand the pros and cons of that because any the way you're building a flow needs to work with this so for example in my situation i'm just going ahead and sending out these email notifications and it works really well and therefore i want all these email notifications to go through at the same time and that's why it's fine that if it runs in a concurrency fashion but if you have certain steps where i need this one to run then i want to capture that data i need the second one to run then concurrency is not for you over there so kind of think about it this sounds like a sweet idea but it might be that double-edged sword which can come back and hurt you so kind of keep that in mind other thing i do is the degree of parallelism i leave that to the default 20 i can slide this all the way to 50. what that basically means is that the way power automate is built as far as this performance is that if they're they're good enough to saying that you know i think for the system to function in a good speed speedy way we are allowing 50 of these to go ahead and run in a parallel way anything after 50 it's going to be in a queue for a while and then it'll go and kick off after that um the default is 20 and the power automate things that the default of 20 should be good i'm going to go with 20. because think about it i it's very few chance that i'm going to send out these to 20 people at the same time if you do then you know leave it at 20 but up to the max you can only go up to 50 which will go out at the same time so kind of keep that in mind all right so i'm going to leave it at the default 20 i'll go and click on done and now i'll just go and say everyone must approve and here was the same thing that i did your request is needed for id grab that it was not from the get attachments it is from the oh scroll down a little too fast right here item is created assigned to the assigned to is going to come into and watch when i do that it's quite possible that it might put another apply to each in there so we'll um yeah approvers claims and after that in the details we went and did that so we'll just go and skip that for now attachments link is the url attachments name is the name we'll do that and everything else i'm going to just leave that off over here in the attachments and that's i'm going to leave that off so hide that over here and remember the big thing that we did over here is we're going to go ahead and see that run simultaneously so let me go and now click on save and let's test that i'm going to go ahead and click save i did that save now let's go and add our third test so i'm going to test number three approvers again this time let's go and who cares they're going through simultaneously so i'll still for the sake of you know testing um i'll do both at that or there go ahead and add an attachment as well save so this is number 17 so number 17 is the one that we're looking for just to help you keep in mind and let's see what happens oh so i see the number 17 came up over here but it should be running simultaneously so if everything did work well we should show up on the other employees and there you go so it's number 17. this person over here um which is gabriel gabriel got the email approval over there daniel got the email approval as well so they're working now simultaneously just by that one little change that we did not in the approval section but in the apply to each and it works so now i'm just going to go ahead and say um yeah approved you know send the assets overnight you know just in case if this is something for in a hardware request so i entered and did that now for my email over here i'll go same thing there approve says send the expedite the process say expedite the process go ahead and click on submit and that also went through over here quite successfully and that's pretty neat right because i went there and showed you a couple of you know fun things but that sending out things simultaneously or in a parallel fashion is a very important process over there and even though there is a flexible flexibility there's a limit that you want to maintain and i kind of showed you both of those so um what i want to kind of finish up the the final piece of this puzzle over here which let's go back to inside the flow over here and click on the edit piece and what i want to do is now focus on saving the data now again this is going to be that very interesting scenario is that how do when i add something in it's going to automatically put that applied to each over here so when you are trying to replicate this in your environment follow the steps that i'm doing it don't go ahead and first put in and apply to each way don't do that follow the steps and when you follow the step it'll actually go ahead and you know automatically generate that second apply to each so here's what i'm going to do i'm actually going to come in and i'm going to first put in a compose action over here and i will be using this compose action in fact i'll go and say that this is the one that i'm going to use the compose for approved and in here i'm going to go ahead and drop in um something which will say who what was the person's name or the display name and what was the comments so i'm going to go ahead and capture from here and i'm going to say uh approve uh response approver's name aha see what happened over here it went ahead and did this went ahead and app put that approver's name let me just finish this up over here and then i will also go ahead and capture the comments see i kind of understand why power automate does what it does it really helps us but it can make things a little confusing at times which is why it's very important how you follow along when you're replicating something especially when you're you know if you're seeing on somebody else which in this case you're seeing mine and you're going to replicate that in yours it's best you do it exactly how i do it which in this case was put that compose statement because it went ahead and added that apply to each again but if you went and add your own apply to each and then you came in and added that compose it's going to add a second apply to it and it gets a little confusing so kind of follow the steps how i'm showing it over here now just for the sake of my sanity i will rename this applied to each and this applied to each is applied to each response all right that's for the approvers i want to apply to each response right here now what i want to do is i want to actually set a condition the condition is was the outcome a approve or reject because based on that i'll go and update either one of those columns now what i need to do is in fact i want to go ahead and get a condition and in the condition i'm going to say what was the outcome and then the outcome is here was the outcome and approved the outcome was basically whatever was selected over here approved not approved not past tense just approved this i'll go ahead and grab that right over here because i actually got that ready for the um you know if it was uh approved then go ahead and basically um you know put that update this section over here this compose statement and once i go and get that compose statement i'll just go ahead and say i'm going to append this to the variable watch this variable over here right put that i've got a variable which i'm going to go and set now come on set variable and the set variable this is for the approved variable and the approved variable i'm going to use the compose approved the compose approved now somebody must be thinking say daniel why are you doing it this way and that way the reason i'm doing it that way is because if you were to go ahead and put this format in over here the variable will go and strip off that middle hyphen and it'll go ahead and strip off any other thing that you do in fact i'm going to even put over here a space and a colon the reason i do that is because there's multiple approval names which are coming over here then you will be able to separate okay this is one batch colon this is another batch it kind of helps over there but if you did this inside over here it strips off the middle um dash and then it'll also go and uh you know um uh scrape off the hyper the the colon over here so doing it in the compose goes ahead and puts it over here and then outside i'll go ahead and put it way way outside and the next step is where i'm going to go ahead and put the update into the sharepoint list and that's where and another reason i'm going ahead and putting the compose because i can't use compose outside this little area i can't it doesn't allow me power automate by design will not allow me but it will allow me to go ahead and fetch the variable value over here so there's a combination of why i am using this compose the reason to use this compose is to get this nice syntax or the format to post into the variable but then i have to use this variable because that's the only way i can go ahead and grab its information outside this little container section over there so it kind of makes sense why i'm doing what i'm doing there's literally a method to this madness so i'll go ahead and now rename this section to rename and i'm going to say um yeah append to approval string variable now if you've already understood you said yeah daniel do you need to do the exact same thing on this side says yep i do i could go ahead and even use the copy and paste functionality but for the sake of this one i'll show that to you that way you just have a good understanding of what's going on same thing i'm just going to say this as compose rejected and it's actually the exact same thing is going ahead and grabbing the approval response approver name space dash space going ahead and grabbing the comment space and then the colon and then after that going ahead and setting the value to the variable so go to the variable set the value to the variable this one is going to be for the rejected one and then the rejected one i go ahead and grab that variable compose reject it there and then i'll just rename that to also append to rejected string variable and then finally i got to go outside so not this action not this action but actually a new step and the new step it's going to be for sharepoint and the sharepoint i click over here and this is going to be for the update and it's going to be the update item and in the update i go and put in there here search for that site go ahead and search for the list see where are you that was that was the one here grab the id best that i grabbed the id from the original when an item is created and this is where i go ahead and pause and tell you why at the initial type of initial side of the video about 30 minutes ago i recommended why you should go ahead and make the title column unrequired this is why you do it because right now even though this is just an update and i already have a value assigned to the title because in the sharepoint column i have it as a required here i will have to go ahead and put that information in so i got to go over here and i got to go an item is created and i got to put that in so bottom line is that when you are when you are using either power apps or power automate um let these two services control what is required and not required but over here on the sharepoint list side you come back to the settings list settings and and i recommend that you go ahead and take up these required things over here uh because that let all that be controlled on the power apps and the power automate side just don't let that control over here because again a great scenario i gave you is that in the title one i have to keep adding that again and again and who knows some issue or some mistake can happen where that title was uh updated or you need it to be updated you know scenarios can happen i just keep getting you know requested to add this again and again when you actually don't so that's my recommendation is that i come over here now i go ahead and now make that as no click on ok and what i will have to do on the flow let me just finish this off what i have to do on the flow is i got to come back on the power automate side and i will actually uh put i can take that off it may not accept it we'll see okay complete um the approved comments were the approval bar rejected comments for the rejected bar and i'll go ahead and save that see it says the title is required over here so what i got to do is i got to go ahead and now i'm just deleting this go and save it get out of it come back into the edit now if i go and put that update which kind of makes it a lot easier because now i don't have to keep scrolling in i come back over here i come back into sharepoint sharepoint select that over here i type in the update update item select our site address poc select our list name which was the concurrent approval step grab the id from the original one and if you notice power automate is smart enough because right now there is not that nice asterisk over there which is required if you remember you can always rewind back and go i said rewind if you scroll back and go a little bit to the beginning side um you will actually see that asterisks over there so kind of you know this this is why um i do what i do in fact this id needs to go over here got a little too excited got a mixture correction i don't need to put anything in the id now i just come over here put in the approver comments is the approval ones rejected comments is the rejected save it and this time it will go through cool and we are done with the flow now all we need to do is do a test so let's come back over here and go through a full thorough test go to now test number four let's do the exact same thing we'll go ahead and add two users add an attachment save it'll kick off the saving is basically for the attachment that's over here we'll be able to see any second that the flow will run but we're going to go ahead and focus our attention on the emails i'm just going to click outside because there's a new email that's coming over here same thing on my side up something way i can get rid of that let me go and now wait [Music] nice did you hear that i know it came on the outlook email side and any second now it should show up over here as well so since it's on the outlook right here it is it's that number 18 over here i'm going to go and click on approve it says send the assets with overnight mail click on submit and then the other approval over here again i'm going to click on approve the link also came through said provide a monitor with wireless keyboard and mouse submit so we want to make sure again that i've subproved it when both the areas are approved both the users or managers have approved it and they put in comments now let's see how flow goes ahead and behaves with that way so if i go in straight to my sharepoint list over here all right so we see over here it came from daniel christian and it looks like we made a little mistake over here because somehow it's only showing daniel even though the workflow under the flow uh completed and the reason why that happened is we made a mistake b did not put the append to um we didn't use the append function always let me show you what that means let's go and fix that problem really quick and we'll do another test is in the set variable i'm going to go ahead and use the variables and in the variable is going to be append to string variable that's the big one so click that it's going to be for the approvals one and then the approvals one we go ahead and add that nice output over here and the output comes from a prude one so i got that and then this one i'll go ahead and first make sure that it is the approved to approval string variable two did that let's fix this problem over here as well go ahead and say append two yep say variable it's going to be the append to string this append to string is actually going to be the rejected one and the rejected one we're going to go ahead and grab this guy the compose function that one and that is how we'll know the difference it's applied to rejected string variable two cool so we gotta go ahead and now update that over here because not this one well actually it is continue that one it'll still be that one so approve comments will be still the approval one right and in fact because we are still up uploading it to the same one so i'm going to get rid of this delete that i can go and get rid of this delete that i'm glad we were able to catch this mistake over here all right so save it now what we'll do is we'll go and test it but also do a double test one will approve it and the other one will be rejected so i'm going to add that next thing over here let's test number five i put that in as gabriel this time over here i put in daniel there get an attachment came through okay save it will run through really fast saving done shows up over here the flow start let me just go and click on that so you know then there's a new one coming click on that there's a new one coming and now we wait we'll try to even replicate the same comments so we'll see what happens over there nice did you hear that so it came up on the outlook let's go take a look at the outlook over here this is for the gabriel so go ahead now gabriel will go and reject it so gabriel rejected this is not my employee so he goes ahead and rejects it hits submit well in the outlook when it comes to daniel the annual say approve send monitor with um wireless keyboard and mouse send with overnight shipping go and submit that that went through completely finished up nicely workflow should finish any second now and we just come back to our sharepoint list and we'll watch to see what happens and there you go the last one see so the daniel's comment it was an approval one if you remember it was approved therefore it only showed in the approve comments gabriel rejected it and they said not my employee so that way it shows in the the rejected comments over there so we were able to successfully now go through and finish off all the approval section and it worked so let's overview all that we just did in the last you know 50 some minutes over here one of the things was we went ahead and did specifically use the weight for the approval one that's the one that we did we went and tried out both of them the approve and reject and the customized ones and the customized ones i showed you the different button options that are available there so that was a pretty cool thing second thing is i showed you by default it will go ahead and send it in a synchronized way which is one after the other approvals and then one of the other approvals completely depends on how you selected the approvers or the names of the approvers on the sharepoint list that was very important over there but when you went into the apply to each not in the approvals advanced settings but in the applied to each and you set that up to concurrent i was each of the approvals went out simultaneously to all of the people over there and in the apply to each for the concurrency we left it at the default 20 over there and then finally in the email section over there um when it went out we were able to go ahead and capture the comments whether it was approved or reject and the comments that metadata we were able to go ahead and capture that and then go ahead and update our sharepoint list over there so this was a whole bunch of things we covered in this section over there hopefully this was helpful to you and as always keep power automating you

Channel: Daniel Christian

Views: 9,712

Rating: 4.9466667 out of 5

Keywords: Start and Wait for an Approval, Daniel Christian MVP, power automate approval, power automate tutorial - microsoft forms attachments, microsoft flow approval workflow, power automate approval workflow, power automate tutorial, Power Automate Approval types, Send Power Automate approvals simultaneously, Power Automate Attachment links, Power Automate response option items, microsoft flow approval multiple approvers, power automate multiple approvers, flow approval sharepoint

Id: frkhd6eAjC8

Length: 47min 4sec (2824 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021