When a flow in Power Automate contains approval steps it can be important to collect the current approval details. Being able to collect the intermediate responses of a Flow approval could help you inform the requestor who has already responded and who has not when multiple people are required to respond.
Create an approval flow
First I will create a flow with an approval step that is assigned to multiple people. In my example below I used the Create an approval step and selected as the approval type Approve/Reject – Everyone must approve. It is of course also possible to select the Custom approval type.
Now that we have an outstanding approval step I’m approving the action as one user so that the approval step isn’t complete and I want to collect the response from the first person approving.
Wait for an approval
Adding a wait for an approval step will now stop my flow until both approvers have responded. Therefore this doesn’t give me any option to run other actions to check the status. Unless I use a parallel branch or I could create a second flow.
In this case I’m going to create a second flow.
Collect intermediate responses
We are now ready to collect intermediate responses of my approval step that was started in the first flow.
My second flow will use the When a record is updated from the Common Data Service connector. The entity that I want to trigger on is Approval Responses.
When this above flow is triggered the run output will now display the responses given by the approver.
Now all we need to do is query the json to get to the right data and then we can use this data to send out email alerts to the person requesting the approval.
Pieter Veenstra
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
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