SharePains

Cancel pending approvals in Power Automate

Cancel approvals pattern

Cancel pending approvals in Power Automate

By:

Pieter Veenstra

Date:

There are quite a few posts about approvals in Power Automate. Have you ever noticed that when you have one of your flows sending an approval that there is no option to cancel the pending approval step?

No cancel option for my pending approval
No cancel option for my pending approval

In this post I’m describing one approach for cancelling the approval steps so that you can resubmit the approval step.

Also, so far there isn’t an cancel approval step available yet in Flow. Hopefully it will arrive soon. So that I can avoid this pattern.

The Pattern

I’m going to start with the general pattern of the approval step and the cancellation of the same approval.

In my case the approval is initiated from a PowerApp. With the Create an approval I’m creating an approval.

This will create an entry within my common data services that presents the approval step to the user that needs to approve the action.

Then within my left branch I’m going to sit and wait for a response.

Cancel approvals pattern
Cancel approvals pattern

In the right branch I’m checking the current details of my approval task.

Get approval details

Once I get the details I set a variable to collect the current approval status. While waiting for a user to respond this will be set to Pending.

A Do until in the right branch will no check on a regular basis the status of my request again and again.

Cancel pending approvals in Power Automate

Now finally if the request was cancelled I need to terminate the flow that is running.

Cancel pending approvals in Power Automate

The terminate step in the above screenshot I’ve set to complete successfully. That way my flows will not fail.

Also note that the approval status is spelled Canceled rather than Cancelled.

Cancelling the request

To update the approval request in my Common Data Services, I’m creating a flow that takes an approval Id and then updated the Record in my CDS and marks it as cancelled.

In my case I’m using a flow to do this using the approval id from the request.

Cancel pending approvals in Power Automate

Please note that this approach may not be 100% supported as data in the CDS is directly updated

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There’s a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I’m the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I’ve been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://staging.sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://staging.sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@staging.sharepains.com

Categories:

,

Tags:

,

25 responses to “Cancel pending approvals in Power Automate”

  1. Gennadiy Avatar
    Gennadiy

    Did you tested your “CANCELLING THE REQUEST” example?
    It does not work for me. the error:
    “192350006 is not a valid status code for state code msdyn_flow_approvalState.Active on msdyn_flow_approval with Id …”
    Any idea?

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      You will need to find the cancel code in your CDS optionset

    2. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      You will need to find the cancel code in your CDS optionset or create an approval request cancel it manually and collect the right number for you

  2. Gennadiy Avatar
    Gennadiy

    Thanks for the quick answer.
    Numbers look OK:
    —
    “_statecode_label”: “Inactive”,
    “msdyn_flow_approval_allowcancel”: false,
    “statuscode”: 192350006,
    “_statuscode_label”: “Canceled”,
    —
    Could you PLS check if your example works and if so, please make a copy of your “Update a record” action. (Copy to clipboard (Preview))

  3. Gennadiy Avatar
    Gennadiy

    Hi Pieter,

    after spending some time It has worked also for me: I had to additionally update the following fields: “Completed On”, “Status value”: “Inactive” (!important), “Owner Type”: “systemuser”.

    Many thanks and cheers,

  4. Yanina Avatar
    Yanina

    Hi, i tried this solution but it didn’t work for me. Appers an error that says: “Principal user is missing prvWritemsdyn_flow_approval privilege”, i assume i have to give permission to the approvals entity… do you know where i have to give this permission?

    sorry for my english.

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      Hi Yanina,

      It will means that your account doesn’t own the approval step. It can also mean that your account isn’t an admin within your Dynamics databases.

  5. Elie Avatar
    Elie

    How did you add the output under approval stage key? I’m not able to locate it .

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      That is set to the Approval ID of the request that we are trying to cancel.

  6. Martin Avatar
    Martin

    Thanks for sharing. The issue I see with this stuff is it delays how quickly your approval reacts. With the do until limits for 5000 runs and 30 days, you can only check around every 10 minutes. So it’ll mean you could be waiting around for the flow to re check the attribute before the rest run, I want it instantaneous !

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      You could put a second Do Until around the initial Do until. That will give you 5000 * 5000 runs.

  7. poweruser Avatar
    poweruser

    Hi,
    Thanks for sharing the detail i am passing the ID and tried to update CDS record for that id but on the update statement i am getting 400 error.

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      I haven’t tried this for a while, i will have a look if I can recreate this solutions again at some point.

  8. John Dom Avatar
    John Dom

    Please do! Some of the properties has changed. Not sure if this is still valid. If you can, please specify the values required for each property in the “Update a record” action.

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      Hi John, I will try to find some time to have a look into that soon.

  9. Anas Sul Avatar
    Anas Sul

    is there a way to get the response directly from the approval itself in flow, rather than getting into records?

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      There isn’t at the moment if you want to use it for cancelling. You can however get the responses from the approval actions.

  10. Anas Sul Avatar
    Anas Sul

    this means adding actions upon cancellation (update file property or delete) cannot be done without the steps in the article?

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      Hi Anas,

      That is easily done. Just collect the results given to you by the approval action in your flow. They will have status details in them, including details on cancellations.

  11. Vinny N. Avatar
    Vinny N.

    Is there a way to cancel just one individual approval out of many multiple approvers that is expecting all users to respond? I am in need of something like this if a person is out. Thanks!

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      Hi Vinny,

      You could have an approval process that is more status driven. So that each approver has its own approval request.

  12. Vinny N. Avatar
    Vinny N.

    How will this work? I am trying to think how to create this Approval status driven model. I can do a loop to do a “Create an approval” action for each user and do a “Wait for an Approval” out of the loop but I would need to assign an Approval ID. That won’t work properly bc Flow will continue on that assigned Approval ID when he approves. Also, when one person rejects, it won’t move on correctly. Too many moving parts.

  13. Jon Zaid Avatar
    Jon Zaid

    This will work even if you leave the Status reason out. But I made a more complete example that works fine.

    Row ID: ApprovalID
    Approval Stage Key: ApprovalID_COMPLETE [I don’t think this is necessary]
    Stage: Complete
    Status Reason: Canceled
    Completed On: utcNow()
    Result: Cancel
    Status: Inactive

    With newer versions of CDS (DataVerse) the option sets seem to fill in correctly.

    My issue is that I have a “Wait for Approval” in a separate flow and although the approval is getting cancelled correctly, “Wait for Approval” is not notified and keeps waiting.

    Any ideas on this?

    (And also can anyone poke MS. This is sorely needed and not nice to do this in an unsupported way)

  14. Ed Avatar
    Ed

    The way I found to get rid of the “192350006 is not a valid status code for state code was together with the status reason, I’m updating the status to “Inactive”

    You need to show the advanced options for it

  15. Ramona Hyde Avatar
    Ramona Hyde

    Too bad it’s using premium connectors. Just gonna ask my users to gently ignore the notification after the timeout. Quite dirty but whatever

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Recent Posts

All Categories