Dynamic Approvals Made Easy: A Deep Dive into Power Automate’s Approval Functionality
Ready to work smarter, not harder? Embrace the world of Power Automate and Dynamic Approvals.
Power Automate offers a wide range of connectors for various services allowing for the automation of certain tasks. A typical task of most organizations is a process to request authorization or some approval task (e.g. vacation requests, or document approvals). Power Automate offers an Approvals action to incorporate human decisions into the automated process.
For a process that only requires a single or sequential approvals, see the following documentation.
The focus of this article is on creating a dynamic document approval cycle. This process will allow for a feedback cycle when a higher-level approver may have a question or require clarification on the document requested for approval. The need for the dynamic feedback cycle arises when during the approval of a document a minor error is identified (e.g. spelling error), with a sequential approval workflow the document would have to be rejected and an entirely new workflow would have to be triggered following the correction. The flexibility to request feedback or correction of minor errors can streamline and make the overall approval process more efficient and effective.
This process will consist of 2–3 approval levels based on the approver’s position and leverage a Switch flow control to implement a state machine solution.
You might wonder, what happens when the assigned approver is out of the office? Check out this post that addresses this common bottleneck and provides a solution to keep you approval workflow flowing.
Approvals Action
The Power Automate Approvals action enables the ability to incorporate approvals or human decisions into a workflow. The specific action that is used in the workflow detailed in this article is Start and wait for an approval. This action starts an automated approval process and then pauses the workflow until a response has been received.
Flow Control Actions
The workflow will leverage the functionality of two flow control actions. The first, Do until, will continue to execute a series of contained actions until a specified condition is met. The second, Switch, evaluates an expression and determines whether the result matches any of the specified values.
In the context of this workflow the Do until will continue to execute until a workflow variable (swithExit) is equal to True, indicating that the workflow should exit the approval loop. The Switch control will evaluate the value of the approvalState variable and execute the specific actions of the corresponding branch.
Dynamic Approval Cycle Workflow
Power Automate Workflow Overview
Workflow Setup
The trigger of the workflow is for a selected SharePoint file however, the trigger could be defined as several other options. The trigger has two inputs: the Level 1 approver, and comments for the requested document approval.
Following this, the workflow initializes a series of workflow variables that will be utilized throughout the workflow including:
- Approval summary variables to store the response summary of each approval completed during the workflow
- An
approvalStatestring variable initially set toLevel 1and will be updated as needed dependent on approval outcomes - A
switchExitboolean variable is updated in theSwitchcontrol and is used to exit or end theDo untilapproval Loop - An
approvalOutcomestring variable that will store the overall outcome of the sequence of approvals
- Two
managerEmailstring variables store the email addresses of the level 2 and level 3 approvers. These approvers are the manager of the previous level approver.
Before the approval loop, the Office 365 user profile is retrieved for the initial level 1 approver, this user is specified during the triggering of workflow. The user email and Id are then exposed through dynamic content with the outputs of two Compose data operation actions.
Approval Loop
The approval loop is initiated with a Do until flow control which will continue to execute the contained actions (i.e. the Switch flow control) until the switchExit variable is equal to True.
The only action within the Do until loop is the Switch flow control. The Switch is defined with four conditions, or in the context of this workflow 3 levels of approvals and 1 branch to exit the approval loop.
For each iteration of the Do until loop, the Switch flow control evaluates the value of the approvalState variable and then executes the actions contained within the branch whose condition is equal to this value. There are four main branches contained within the Switch with the conditions of Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, and Exit. It is the functionality of the Switch flow control that allows for feedback or the cyclic nature of the approval workflow.
In general the Level 1 approval is a preliminary approval conducted by the initial user. The Level 2 approval is conducted by the manager of the Level 1 approval however, the Level 2 approval action has an option to request feedback from Level 1 in addition to approving/rejecting the approval. Following the Level 2 approval the Level 3 approval is assigned to the manager of the Level 2 approval (if they have one, i.e. the Level 2 approver is not the president of the organization). Similar to the Level 2 approval, Level 3 can request feedback from any of the prior approvals.
Level 1 Approval
The Level 1 branch is the first approval in the sequence of approvals needed. The branch starts with the Start and wait Approval action.
Following the approval, the approvalOutcome variable is updated to the value of the Approval outcome property and the level1Approval is set to the value of the Approval response summary value. In general the level#Approval variable is used in the final notification email and documents the final approval history.
After the approval and setting of the variables, the Office 365 Get manager action is used to get the user profile information for the manager of the level 1 approver. For this workflow there are always at least two levels of approval, meaning the level 1 approver will always have a manager, see the Level 2 description for the handling of when this may not be the case.
Following this action, the workflow updates the value of approvalState to Level 2 and sets the variable managerEmail2 to the email address from the body of the above Get manager action. Setting this variable allows the workflow to set the approver of the Level 2 approval dynamically.
This completes the first iteration of the Do until loop, and since the switchExit variable was not updated, and is still equal to False the loop starts again by moving to the Switch flow control and evaluating approvalState, which has now been set to Level 2.
Level 2 Approval
The level 2 branch is executed any time during the workflow when the approvalState variable is equal to Level 2, this can occur following a level 1 approval or by the level 3 approver requesting feedback or more information from the level 2 approver.
The branch has three main sections: 1) the approval, 2) updating and setting workflow variables, and 3) evaluating the Outcome property of the approval to move the workflow to the next branch of actions.
The level 2 approval action is a Custom Response — Wait for one response type, this differs from the level 1 approval. The custom responses type is needed to provide the Feedback - Level 1 response option, this option indicates that the workflow should be sent back and execute the Level 1 branch actions. Following the approval, the approvalOutcome and level2Approval variables are set, the same as they were in the Level 1 branch.
After setting the variables the level 2 branch has a nested Switch flow control: Evaluate Approval Outcome Level 2
The Switch flow control has 3 branches utilized by the workflow. The Reject and Feedback - Level 1 branches are executed when the corresponding approval response is selected and each sets the approvalState to the appropriate value. A Reject outcome exits the approval loop, and a Feedback - Level 1 outcome moves the workflow back to the Level 1 branch. The Approve branch searches for the user profile of the email stored in the variable managerEmail2 (i.e. the level 2 approver - the manager of the level 1 approver) and then has a Condition flow control based on the Job Title of the level 2 approver.
If the JobTitle property is equal to President (i.e. the level 2 approver is the President of the organization) there are no additional approvals required and approvalState is set to Exit. If the JobTitle property is not equal to President the workflow uses the Office 365 Get manager action to get the manager of the level 2 approver and then sets the approvalState and managerEmail3 variables, similar to the last actions of the Level 1 branch.
This completes this iteration of the Do until loop, and since the switchExit variable was not updated, and is still equal to False the loop starts again by moving to the Switch flow control and evaluating approvalState, which could now have a value of Exit, Level 3, or Level 1.
Level 3 Approval
The Level 3 branch is similar to the Level 2 branch. Major differences include the addition of the Feedback - Level 2 response in the Approval action as well as in the Evaluate Approval Outcome Level 3 switch flow control.
The Switch flow control on this branch only sets the approvalState variable based on the Outcome of the approval, there is no need in the Approve branch for the Get manager and Condition control because this is the final level of approvals. If the Outcome of the approval is equal to either Approve or Reject the approvalState is set to Exit and if equal to one of the Feedback responses the approvalState is set to the corresponding level.
Exit Approval Loop
If any approver rejects the document or if all approvers approve the document the workflow sets approvalState to Exit which executes the Exit branch. This branch sets the switchExit variable to True which will exit the Do until approval loop and sends a summary email to who triggered the workflow (i.e. requested the document approval).
Once the Do until loop is exited the workflow is complete however, this could also be followed by additional actions if required by the business process.
Summary
A couple of scenarios that can be encountered during an approval process are the identification of minor errors which may not warrant rejecting the document fully followed by a new approval workflow, or an approver may just require clarification or additional information from a prior approver. This article highlighted and demonstrated how the Power Automate flow controls Do until and Switch can be used together to achieve an approval process that allows for a feedback cycle. Utilizing this method no longer limits the approval workflow to just a set of sequential approvals and facilitates back-and-forth collaboration between the different levels of approvals.
Check out these blog posts for other helpful Power Automate Guides:
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Originally published at https://ethanguyant.com on September 7, 2022.
