SharePoint Power Hour: Microsoft Flow Approvals

[Music] welcome to power our hi I'm Laura Rogers and this is our SharePoint power our that we do Wednesdays at 11:00 central today's topic is going to be the new approvals in Microsoft flow and power hours just an hour where I kind of do will do just sometimes the demos are fully planned out and orchestrated sometimes they're more just kind of ad hoc but we go over I'm not a programmer I don't write code so I like to go over things you can do out of the box in SharePoint office 365 without having to write code without having to do anything without having to have super technical background so we've been doing a couple of hundred of these episodes they're all on my my this wonder Laura YouTube channel and I'm a Microsoft MVP I've been an MVP for about seven years or so and I my background is actually in server admin stuff so you'll see me do some you know things in central admin and talk about a little bit of you know User Profile Service and things like we've done but I love my favorite thing in SharePoint is all the advanced functionalities and especially workflows and forms and automating business processes I really enjoy that I do that pretty much all day every day doing consulting and it's a lot of fun so today we're going to go over this new thing that has just come out in the past I don't know a couple of months and as Microsoft flow approvals now I started to touch on it two weeks a couple of weeks ago when I did my recap of all the new announcements that came out at the Microsoft the SharePoint virtual summit I did about 10 or 20 minutes of going over some of the flow approval stuff but this time we have the whole power hour is dedicated to that so we'll go ahead and dive right in I will go ahead and go over to if you you all could do this to anybody can go to float Microsoft comm and sign in and you can sign in if you have an office 365 account you can sign in using that but you could also just use a Windows Live account to sign in so let me go ahead and share my screen here let's see here we go alright so this is what it looks like when you go to float up Microsoft comm and you'll notice this new approvals section and this is this sort of hub where any anyone will be able to go and be able to see approvals that are waiting for them now I haven't created any approval approval flows yet I don't have any waiting for me to approve so that's what I'm going to go ahead and walk through so I'll go ahead and go to my flows and I have a let's see I have a travel site here so what what I do is I have a travel request list and people can request travel so I'm going to create a simple approval flow that will go ahead and you know send this to the manager to approve that person's travel and then we'll go ahead and add some other levels of approvals and go over all the different settings and things like that and Microsoft's actually announced a few new pretty awesome things that you can do in flow and the interface is actually changed to just recently all right so that's what I'm going to have I'm going to have a travel request list I actually have a approval status field here so I don't have that field showing in the form so let me go ahead and go to the list settings and look at what that is so I have approval status here is going to be see it's got different levels it goes through like it starts off as new it goes to manager approval that's the first one and then it goes to VP approval etc so as we go through the approvals in the workflow will have it changing this approval status in the list so I'm just going to leave this screen pulled up right here actually I'm just going to copy these all out to notepad just so I can reference them and not I have to guess or get in or do typos okay so I'll go ahead and create a new flow and what I'm going to do is I'll just call it new travel and new travel approval I'm going to use this new approvals action but I want to send it to the manager so before I even do the approval I need to get the person's manager who is the person who's filling out the form so I'll go ahead and go to my I have an office 365 C office 365 it's going to give you get manager office 365 users and you can see that within this category of office 365 users I have get manager so you can also get if you are a manager you can get your direct reports and you can also do other things like do searches for users but I'm going to just use the get manager first so clicked on that I think it's thinking about it oh I got to do a trigger that's why it won't let me into it okay well I got to do a trigger silly me to say when a new travel request is is it created I have to say I have to decide you know what's going to make it send to my manager so yeah don't mind me all right when a new item is created and then I'll just need to get the URL to that site and that's going to be this URL and started run that site I need the travel request list so when a new item is created in the travel request list and I can rename this when I new travel request is created I like that because that helps it you know visually to be able to see what's going on in this workflow so when a new travel is crit request is created what do I want to happen this is where I choose an action and I can just choose office 365 users get manager and get manager of who it's pretty simple so it's going to be the manager of whoever filled in that travel request so I'm going to it's going to be the created by person requester I actually renamed in this travel request just regular old custom SharePoint list I rename the created by field and just called it requester so you can by the way rename those out-of-the-box fields if you like too so I'll just say I'd like to get the manager of whoever the requester is so then once I get the manager then I have that in my workflow to use it later all right get the manager and then I want to do one of these new approval actions so I'll just type approval and it narrows it down so here this blue one now there is an office we see five outlooks send approval email one that is not the one I'm referring to here this approvals this blue one is the one that is tied to this whole approvals section and this whole new sort of interface very cool so I'll say approvals start an approval and here are my approval fields now this is going to have some different settings in it than the other one the start an approval one so if you if you have a situation where you actually need to change whether it says approved or rejected or the actual outcomes and do different things like that there is a there couple of different actions that will let you do sort of differ types of customizations to your approval so it's just not going to be this one it's just going to be this one's going to have a proven reject and make a comment so what do I want the title of this approval to be approve travel and then I'll just put four see the person who created it so I'll say requester display name so it's approved travel for whoever that is and then who am i assigning to this is why I went and did the get manager thing see this little section right here where it says get manager that is the output those are my variables that I can use to be able to do things with the value of whoever that manager is so I'm going to say the email of the manager and then details so details is going to be like a description so I'll just say travel to and I'll put where are they traveling to so let me scan skim down this list destination and then ah see departments and cost see what all this looks like when it comes out in the email okay and then I'm going to have I actually have a manager filled in the list that that's why it has all these manager emails so I actually have a people field in my travel request list where someone could fill out the manager and that was something that I had created where I was manually sending it to a manager but in this case I could just take this data and populate it and put it into that travel request if I want to store the value of who that manager is so now I need to have a link to the item so this part gets a little interesting so let me see I'm going to get the I'm going to try link to item that looks like a very obvious way to link to the item item link description is going to be what it's going to say so I'm going to make this link say the name of the traveler so that's the requestor display name - and then where are they traveling - so that's where I'm going to put the destination okay so that's the item link description so I'll go ahead for now and just create this flow and see what it does and then we'll run it and try it out and then see well what else would we need it to do okay so now we're done look at this new interface I have my icons representing what actions I'm using in this flow and I'll go ahead and use my cool little I'm going to put my whiteboard on here okay so I have a this section over here that's got the icons it's showing me which connections I'm using and see which account that I'm authentic ated into and then it's got owners so this is when we do those team flows and we share the flow with other people and that way you'll be able to see who is able to use that flow I'll probably need to be able to if I want people to be able to like manually trigger it themselves then I'll have to add owners to it and then once I've started running the flow this area right here is where I'm going to see the history of the flow I love that I can see that all on this new sort of dashboard for the flow itself all right go clear my whiteboard there okay now I need to make it run so I'll click cancel and I'll go ahead and fill out a new form and hopefully I'll have time to be able to convert this to a power app form and show you you can actually use the approvals stuff in the power empower apps that approvals connection all right where am I going I think I'll go to Hawaii again I'm oh I you know what I need to make the manager field not required and I need to go ahead and make sure I've got okay I've got some departments in there let me do that real quick I don't want to have to fill in a manager because I'm going to get the manager automatically now this is something that I had to do when I created this list before when you know SharePoint designer 2013 workflows there isn't necessarily a way to automatically get the manager so just make that not required so I don't have to bother with it there we go this demo the site this travel request site is actually what we build we've build the whole thing top to bottom from scratch in my work flows and forms class let's see it's going to ANSI I'm going to go so I'm going to be updating my workflows and forms class to add some some powerup stuff to actually put power-ups in here but everybody doesn't use power raps and flow yet so that's why I've been of right now it just uses SharePoint designer and just add the Box stuff alright go okay I filled in my travel request and oh I didn't fill in a department let me go pick my department I T there we go alright now this should trigger a flow we'll go ahead and flip back over here and we'll see if it if we are required to refresh the page or if it's just going to no and it's just going to show it here we'll wait a few seconds what do you guys think who else here I don't know if I got everybody shouting out and saying there they're in here and they're hanging out in the chat window and watching and what do you think what do you think of this new interface it's pretty awesome there are no runs it has not run yet alright it failed actually get manager Phil I don't have a manager that's why action get manager failed so now this is actually a new identity a new thing that Flo has um yes Reijo I can do that this is a new thing that Flo has that it has some error reporting so now in my flow I can build in doing something different if it fails when it gets a manager I am the boss I'm the CEO I don't have a manager right Joelle so um they're going to be either people in your organization like the CEO who don't have a manager or their your maybe your Active Directory isn't accurate and people have you know every now and then you'll forget and not put a manager for somebody in there so then it's not going to populate in here so to make this flow work inspect the inputs to this action ensure they would find the right resource this action field because it tried to access something that does not exist I love all these details all right so this is telling me all the details about why my get manager failed and I could even resubmit it if I wanted to I'm going to go edit my flow and I want you to notice this blog post that came out I pulled it up right here I'm going to I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to send you guys the link in the chat window here um alright this is something they recently just added error handling steps counters so error handling how to add an action after a failure first shell to figure out which action you want to monitor for failure so in this case it's going to be get manager so I want to let's see doc tada select which action you want and I want to do a run after all right so if any if an action has any type of failure except a timeout so this in this case it wasn't a timeout work it was skipped so this is this is letting me actually put some error handling in here use run after to handle missing records all right so you know if someone's missing a manager we have a couple of options we could actually hard code someone else's name in there to be the manager so that um it will you know get routed to someone else it's like a backup person as a manager which would probably be the best idea to have someone in there and then but this is going to be the new the new method to do this is you basically add in this error handling so let me do this I'm going to do um configure run after right here in my workflow now I'm not going to spend too much time just doing an der error handling because I want to go through this whole approvals part but um we'll go ahead and add that in here so you can see right here configure run after so I click configure run after and I think I clicked it mmm click it again maybe not oh come on nothing is clickable hold on a second let me close it and go back into it let me do this I wonder if it will only let me yeah good fit can't configure run action on an action directly following a trigger okay well I'm not gonna be able to do it for that one alright so instead of using the manager field here instead just for me since I don't have a manager I'm just going to go say instead of assigning to the manager I'm going to assign it to I want to send this to myself because I want you to see the approvals that come in so I'll just put my name in here there we go and I just see I just typed my name in there all right that is my troubleshooting method right now okay so now I'm going to go trigger it again by creating another new one that's the fun of having a live demo is that you get to see me having to type all this stuff in can I go and I'm going to I'm an IT that's another thing the department we can get the users Department we don't have to have them fill that out right so we'll go ahead and add that in later as well and we could actually just take that field off of what they have to fill in and we could just make it so that it just gets their department automatically all right so I went ahead and created one so I can see this is the previous run that failed right here so let's go ahead and click see all and I'll just wait a few seconds for that to refresh and show the new run yeah I think from from what I could see from the error handling that while we wait for this that it didn't it didn't want to run that on the get manager so oh my goodness Ted's dente' waiting in the meantime anyway so it's going to show up I'm going to open up approvals over here in another tab it's going to show up over here so for the person that gets assigned and approval it's they're going to have this interface so let me go ahead and show you when you I want you guys to all do this I want you to go make sure you have the flow app installed on your phone and when you go to the flow app you'll have a new tab it I can just just holding my phone up you'll have a new tab at the top that says approvals and so that is where just typical end users think about like managers VP's people walking around they're busy they're on their phones they're going all over the place they're traveling they can just see the approvals that they need to approve right there on the approval screen in the app and it will actually ping and pop up when you have something to approve where you can get a random phone call while you're doing a demo so that's going to show their list of the things waiting for them to approve right there on that approvals tab so this is what this is what it looks like it's not just something that they have to in the browser but it's something that they'll be able to get to no matter where they are and to me those people especially those like those VPS and CEOs that the c-level people that are traveling a lot those are usually the ones that it's helpful to have them available on the go like that it didn't ah didn't trigger at that time let's see I filled out a new one and it didn't trigger it that's awesome now that's another thing about flows is you can't necessarily set it to either manually trigger or also be triggered when when an item is created like you can with sharepoint designer so in this case i couldn't just go back to it and say well let me just quickly manually trigger it if you manually trigger it you'd actually have to have a completely different flow to be able to manually trigger those I'm gonna go try and create a new one and just see what's wrong with it and see if I can get it to work sorry about that mm-hmm I'd see it's probably gonna like both of them are going to trigger at the same time or something okay so we go back to my flows I can also see that these are kind of the other things I can do with it I can save as so save a save as will be useful if I need to have just a quick copy of it or like kind of use it as a template failed 21 seconds ago all right Oh so I'm not okay I needed to take the get manager completely out so even if it says get manager and I'm not doing anything with that value and I'm not even using it I needed to take the action completely out sorry about that all right just remove it delete fine got it all right going to multiple I'm going on multiple trips like all in the same week in that great are you all trying this along with me that'd be fun alright so that one is going to trigger and it's not going to air out because it completely took out the get manager step that's another difference between these in SharePoint designer because in SharePoint designer usually if it tries to get something you're not actually using that value it's not really going to necessarily affect it like like this one did it was trying to get the manager even though wasn't even using the get manager values later in the workflow it's still since it couldn't get a manager it just aired it out okay let's see another thing I want to go over and hopefully we don't spend too much time troubleshooting this is we'll go ahead and go to power apps and this approvals action that we're using this will not necessarily just an action it's actually a connection that you can pull have you guys seen this you can pull this into power apps and instead of having to create a flow to send an approval you can create the use the approval action directly in your power app and as soon as somebody submits that form it is sending the approval like instantaneously it's not going and waiting for a flow to trigger it's just directly sending it so that's an that's one of those things that you kind of way with you know your logic in what you're using whatever technology you're using is kind of just try out you know you can use the tech the logic in the form or you can use it in the work flow and just kind of try both and see which one's going to that you're going to like the best I'm going to do another one here just get enrolled now with the air handling I'm noticing that it does error handling on actual errors but as far as why these aren't even triggering I'm not sure okay so here's one that started running seven seconds ago okay so that one's running it's waiting for approval so now when I go to my approvals page here this is the approval interface so it says approve travel Laura Rogers and then when I click on it it's showing me the whole this whole interface this whole window all about this box that I clicked on let me go ahead and turn my little white board on okay so I have each each thing that I'm going to be approving is going to show they're going to show as a bunch of boxes on this receive received request page it's going to show who it's from and when it was requested these are the details that I typed in so remember when I was configuring the action in the workflow and I put in a few values from the form that was filled in so here are the details that's it's letting the person know and then the person can actually go click the link to go look at the item so this is the travel request form that got filled in and I actually have this link going to the display form and it's showing me the form so this is how the person can go quickly look at the full form and then it I like the way it takes it to a different window so they don't get lost and then they're away from their approvals page so then this is where they can approve reject so after they click to approve or reject then let me clear my white board here then it's going to give them the ability to make comments all right and then they can confirm their comments so the whether they approve or reject and their comments those are all values we can use later on in the workflow all right so now we're going to go back to looking at so we can see this ran successfully go ahead and refresh that see it's finished I didn't have it doing anything afterwards so let's go ahead and edit that all right after a trial requests great it starts at approval but you got to right back to the item you got to say that it was approved you've got to maybe send somebody an email you've got to do something else because all this one does is it just they have an approval they approve it and then it goes off their dashboard so you know we got to have a record of that we got to do something else with that data so from there that's where we can decide now we can we can put a condition in here to say if it gets approved do something if not do something else so let's let's do that let's see I will do a new step at a condition so my condition is going to be based on what is equal to what so their response let's scroll down a little bit see the response approve reject and again in this approved action it's only a proven reject you can use some of those other actions like the other outlook ones that have to do with approvals and getting getting feedback those will let you actually customize what the options are going to be so response is equal to approved then that's where it's going to approve see so it's not approved its approve so if the sponsor is equal to approve do this otherwise do that now if they're approved I want to go ahead and move this item on to the next step in the workflow so I'll go ahead and do SharePoint and I want to edit so I want to update an item which item do I want to update I want to update that same item that they had filled in at the very beginning but I still need to go ahead and put the URL to my site so I'll go ahead and go travel to is the URL to my site and I'll put that here as that's the item I want to update and the list in that site is my travel request list and what's the ID this is the ID from when the new item got created destination now this is kind of ridiculous that it makes you fill in the required fields again right here because these values are already filled in so I'm going to have to go select the parameters from basically what they've already filled in and re-add them in here just because they're required fields so trip stars required so all these other they already have values we're just updating the existing item all right so I want basically what I want to do is I want to make that manager that status of that travel I want that to be the value that we update but guess what it's not showing here now there are a couple of different reasons why it could be not showing here I'm pretty sure I know why it's a choice field it's a drop-down choice so you saw that we went and edited the list and we saw that it was a choice field of several different values or potentially it could be that it's not in the content type it's not showing in the form so there are a couple different things so let's go change it instead of being a choice field change it to a text field and I'll bet it'll show here so I'm going to go ahead and update this all right and then go back here and I'm going to go change this go to list settings and in you know it doesn't really make sense to have to have it be a choice field anyway since end-users aren't ever going to be filling this out so we'll just change it to a single line of text that makes sense all right you guys are very quiet okay that's fine mm-hmm just go make sure that it saved that change that I made yeah it says single-arm text okay good now we'll go back to make sure I'm on the right one and we close that okay edit my flow and see if those that field appears right so when I update the item look at that approval status so this is where I want to change the approval status to it already did got approved by the manager so the approval status needs to be changed to VP approval and what else would I need to write to this so I could write to it that like that manager field that we obtained we don't so first of all it's a people field we don't have people fields available to us to write to from flow yet and then the other thing we were going to talk about was that Department drop-down now the Department drop-down is a lookup field so we're not going to be we're not going to write to that one because actually in my list in my site I actually have a lookup list of VPS where it actually you know you can set the workflow to go get the VP of from for the department for that person so what I'm going to do here though is I'm going to set this to VP approval so that it changes the status and then that way that's it's moving on to the next stage right and then what else would I want to do might want to send them an email letting them know that it's been approved but if they don't approve it I want to set that approval status to rejected so if they don't approve it if no add an action and I'll do another update item SharePoint's update item come on all right and then I get to put my site address in here again travel request list and the ID is just the idea of the item I created and then it makes me fill in this destination everything again daunted um destination trip start okay and then the approval status is going to be rejected okay and now I could just send an email after one of those two things happen and just put the parameter of whether it was approved or rejected in there right no you're right that's a great question Todd but there isn't an option in here to just copy this and paste it over there so that would be a good thing to have though yeah all right so I'm going to send an email and that's going to be office 365 Outlook send an email I'm going to send this to the person who created the travel request so that in my case is the requester email subject travel to blah blah blah the status of your travel request and this is where you can put the the value from I'm scrolling and scrolling from the start approval thing so this is where I can put the response and then by and that can put information about who did that so the approver name alright so that is there are more advanced options you could do you could see see people you could actually put an attachment here etc I'm just going to go ahead and update my flow now I'll go I'll go ahead and add more want one more tribal request in here but then what I want to do is go ahead and customize this with power apps and show you how the approval thing works in there so maybe we can have it whoever the managers manager is we could put that in there let's see trying to think okay go ahead and fill out another one let's see I'll go to Timbuktu and that's going to cost a lot of money and I'm going to leave that alone I'm not going to mess with the approval status okay that is going to run the flow is going to run it's going to send me an email let me go do something real quick in here and we pull this over here while I wait for that okay let's see if that just pops in here without me having to refresh it while I go do this real quick time to time alright did it appear no it didn't appear yet let's see where is that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to open this and I'm going to do the power app and then I'm going to open this in another window so that it I can log in as another user so you can see how that it could get so when the manager opens the form how it can get their manager alright and it's another way of getting the manager inside of power apps instead of just inside of the approvals alright let's go ahead and refresh this so it's just it's basically just running on every other item that I create in here it's real nice alright I'm not going to wait for that I'm going to go ahead and go to the power app stuff so I can go to this list I can click power apps and choose create an app I've had more luck with power apps in edge by the way in chrome it just keeps crashing doesn't let me do it travel requests play the Jeopardy song while power-ups and flow or are doing their thing um yeah great idea Joe I'll mention some pros and cons between this and SharePoint designer approval oh my gosh all of the tasks have always been what's annoyed me about SharePoint designer approval those task processes I like to just keep it as simple as possible the fact that this is got an app and it's got the approval screen that already exists and it's got um I'll let those that stuff built into it and it doesn't make the end user go to all these multiple places and have this task list floating out there with a bunch of tasks no one ever completes and I think and this is modern of course and of course you know mobile so those are a lot of things that I like about this better a negative though is going to be document libraries last time I looked like last week we still can't get metadata on document libraries so there is no way to know who created the document to be able to send an approval email to that person's manager you have no no metadata for documents in libraries that this demo is in a SharePoint list it's in a custom list it's not in a library so I'm skipping the little tutorial here so now when the idea is work so we're progressing now from we had the item the travel request item that's getting filled in which is this form it's going to the manager for approval the manager gets a link to it they go look at it they approve it and then what do we want to do next is we want to be able to have that next person be able to get their manager but we're just going to get their manager in a different way I'm going to show you that action in here someone asked can we use is there a pause functionality in flow I'll have to just go look in there and see if there's a pause or wait action I haven't um but I'll have to do that in a minute I don't want to get myself soos too sidetracked here okay so add a date add a data source and see approvals is a data source that I can add pretty cool right okay so now I've added my data source I can also add that data source that will get me the manager and that is this users data source office 365 users all right ok so what do I want to do I want to have them go to this form I want them to see a travel request that they need to approve and be able to have them approve it and have it go to that person's manager so we'll go ahead and edit let me zoom on in anis edit this screen of the Edit form I'm not going to spend too much time creating a new screen and things like that because again this is just an hour-long demo trying to demo all these things so what I'm going to do is add a show you the how it has the ability to go get the person's manager in here and I'm actually going to do that I'm just going to create a new screen where I'm just going to do only that on the screen just so you can see what it's doing and how it works just to kind of have it like a little clean area to do that so I'll just do a new screen here and so on this screen I'm going to just put a box on here that's going to show me this information so I can just get that information about the logged in user they're their managers name all right so first of all I want to name this I'm just going to rename it my manager and I'm going to refer to this so as for the text as for what it's going to have in it this is where I am going to use that data source all right office 365 users seats it's got up as soon as I start typing it it says office 365 users dot manager and then who's manager do I want to get all right now in this case we can just say get the manager of the logged in user which I don't have a manager so user get the manager of the logged in user I don't have a manager again so I'm going to just type in the email of a manager of a person who I want to get their manager Oh dot yeah I need to put in quotes sorry actually I need to put it in a separate field hold on a second all right I'm going to put it in another little field this is covering it up there we go I'm going to put another little text box on here because I want to store Joelle's name okay so I'm going to say this text box I'm going to say me I want to get the manager of whatever values in that text box so office 365 users manager of me dot txt John Mayall I need the email address of that person look at that and that cool do you see that and just pulled in my name so it's got this about this text box is just representing who the logged in user is which I just typed her name in here because I want it you know because I don't have a manager and it's automatically getting her manager which is me pretty cool you like that so that's how we can get the manager of somebody so I have this my manager field and then if I want to send something for approval to that manager let's go over to the Edit screen I'm going to go add a new button on here it's kind of not that much real estate but I'm going to insert a button I'm just going to put a cute little star on here make it yellow see this kind of doesn't really fit there how long down tadam there we go okay this little random button I want to put it on a separate button because I want to show you how it's going to use this action and I don't want to get it all mixed up with all the other actions right so I'm going to take this and I'm going to say I'm going to start typing approval so what I want to happen when people click on this see as soon as I start typing approval this is the approvals connection that I created I'm going to create version twos the the latest version and that's this the automatically the version that we're using in the workflow so I'm going to do version two and then look it's telling me all the values so doesn't this look familiar title assigned to so those are all the values that need that it needs which are exactly let me go flip back over here go edit this and show you how it's similar see when I go start an approval got title assigned to details link descript it's all these exact same things but I need to just type put those out out here in the power app so for example the title is going to be in this case I'll just put destination will be the title or not see oh let me see so it doesn't need to have the name of the field it needs to have the name of the box that that value is in so in this case the destination right here it's the name of this textbox that the destination is in is data card value 14 I'm going to rename this and call it destination box that's very helpful to rename these to something more useful notice I didn't have to unlock that to rename it either so the destination is going to be destination box see and then a sign - that's where I can put the manager so I'll put my manager say my manager value and then what is it one after that oh this is a little little funky huh so this has got this whole set of syntax edit where it needs to have information about all those extra fields like the notification the URL they need to go to the details and the item link again just like all the values that we saw that we would fill in in the workflow we're just this is the sort of more messy looking way to fill it in inside of the power app we just have to use the same syntax they have laid out here so I'll start typing notification URL and then what do I want the URL to be I'm just going to put got a couple of different URLs no so it's got details it's got a notification URL text details text item link text and item link description so what do those match up to so deep details text so notification URL details text item link text item link description details text item link item link description the thing that I'm not clear on is the notification URL text so I'm just going to type something HTTP and I put that in quotes and then it just needs a comma and then it needs the details and the details are that that's all that text that it had like just all the extra information about the thing that I'm getting approved so this is where I can put some additional you know some of the fields from this etc I'm just gonna for time sake I'm just going to type something in here and then the next thing I need is the item link now item link this is tricky so when you're doing a brand new form you're not going to have the item link yet because the item doesn't exist yet that is why this process in my example I'm using a form that's not brand new this is a form that's already been created this is not something that I'm running that I want to run when it's new I want to say like well the approver is you know going into an item that's already been created I try to spend like an hour to the other night trying to get it to you know figure you can't figure out the item link because you don't have the idea of it to it because it doesn't exist yet so you'd have to do something like make an action create the thing and save it so you have an ID and then go back and query the list and get that ID and then put it back in here and you know you'd have to build all that in so again this is not going to be one that's brand new or it wouldn't have an item link so for item link I actually have we have that value in here so I want like when I go to data sources and I am looking at my my travel request this list is going to have that value of the item link so and just to make it really easy so we can see that on here I'm going to add that to my form so see link linked to item I'm just adding it on here just for expedience sake so now I can see the link to the item and I want to I don't want it I don't necessarily want to edit that though I'll just put it on the display form detail screen state link link to item I'll just add that so then I have this value this is I'm going to rename it link to item item and I'm going to call it I'm going to call it travel item just so I know that's what that is right like to travel item so the value of this is what is going to be able to be my URL and then go back over here and finish writing this thing all right item link link link to travel item and then item link description could be I could just type some words in here or I could put the name of the destination in here I'll put the destination destination box there all right is that all closed closed parenthesis all right so now it doesn't have a little error anymore it's got it's just it's all filled in I have no red I have it's all functioning so in this case I'll go ahead and what we're just going to leave it as it is just in this sort of weird place because I want to be able to test this out so I'm going to save this um someone's asking canned tasks be turned off just don't use a task list yeah that's my solution alright um save this and then I want to share this so that other people in the organization can use it now of course they would have to have access to this travel request site to be able to use it right okay so I'm going to go ahead and just add everyone in my org for now and click Save and then this is where I'll need to log in as a different user to pretend that I'm to make make sure that it can get my manager here so I can see what it looks like as a different user okay so let me make sure that I am that user has access to the site site people in groups numbers sure all right now the person that I want to share this travel site with is going to be able to be a member and add things to this and I'll go ahead and log in as that user in a different browser window let me go make sure that the power app works right now see here's my travel request app so I can go here and open it cool right okay sorry type in a password alright so here's my travel request list I've got all the items that are existing here that I can click on now notice I didn't edit any of this or make it pretty or change the order that it's in any you know or at all see when I edit it here's that button so that button is going to send it for approval to whoever my manager is but I don't have a manager right I'm going to go add one more thing before I go in login is that other user and I want to be able to see I want to be able to get to the other screen right the one that I created the one that I need to be able to see who the manager is to see that it's holding that value I just want to be able to quickly have a button that will let me go to it to just see what's on it just for testing purposes right so right now I have this other screen but I don't it's not doing anything it's not I can't get to it in any way so first of all I'll make this have user email so whoever the logged in user is that's going to be their email address and I will put a button on another button on the edit screen this is what apps look like when I create them when I'm testing them they're just a big mess another random button that is going to just take me to this other screen navigate to screen one I didn't even name it anything nice okay save todd's down alright alright so that is saved and I'll go back over here to I'll go to my list down there we go so here's my list and here's where I will be able to go in and open the power app so let's go look at it again oh you got to be kidding me it's not wanting me I reset a password and then I then I realized that it was uh making me change it when I logged in I didn't want to do that okay to do going to this other browser and see you saw that error that error was because I have no manager so that's a it's the same concept that we saw in the flow of having no manager and getting an error but this one's just using that same approvals connection and getting that no manager error inside of the power up see loading in and this is get my site and I'll go ahead and pull up this other browser window as this other user so I just really just want to open up this um list as this other user open up the app as the other user and be able to see that value [Music] open oh all these authentication screens are killing me almost done oh okay runtime error that's high I'm gonna have to wrap that one up it always gets see it always gets tricky when you have to do a demo and login as different users because it gets confusing and then you have all these different windows open and then you're just confusing the audience by doing that but I really wanted to in this case when you're trying to get a manager get information about someone else and like send something through an approval process it really helps to be able to see what each of those people along the way are going to see but apparently Firefox didn't like my power app or something happen I'm not going to worry about that right now but I went ahead and go ahead and see if you have any other last questions and let you know that we're not having power our next week let's see sandy says to get the item link I wonder if you use the flow template that does the old style approval on the item to figure out the syntax of an item like well it's sandy it's that the it's that the item doesn't exist yet so you don't have an ID to be able to get the link to it that's the that's the trick I mean you have to you have to wait till after it exists to be able to go get that value so you would have to just build in an action that submits it and then goes and gets the value and then does something with it like on another page or something so all right cool well um I think that was a fun demo I really enjoy trying all these new fun things in power apps and flow and kind of taking things that I've done in the past with other types of workflows and other forms and kind of translating them to how I would do it with these new technologies so that's one things I was doing with this travel request so as you can see it's a really interesting balance we have a lot of really really cool new modern things and modern functionalities that exist and flow has been updated tremendously they're adding you can see they're adding in the error handling and adding in like they change the way the screen looks and they're constantly improving it but you can still see that there are a couple of things that little workarounds that I had to do like you don't have choice fields or you don't have people fields and kind of little things that you have to change or figure out a different way to do so it's it's interesting you'll be able to use you know move some of your processes to flow and power apps but you kind of just you have to try them out to be able to see and weigh the differences and what work you know the extremity of the workarounds that you would have to do maybe so good times alright well we're not having a Power Hour next week but thank you all for coming and it was really had a good time showing you all the new approvals action in flow and in power apps bye everybody

Channel: Laura Rogers

Views: 34,036

Rating: 4.7727275 out of 5

Keywords: SharePoint, Office 365, Approvals, Workflow

Id: lfjlXXrfjwc

Length: 66min 44sec (4004 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2017