Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

I have a Power Automate flow that is triggered when a SharePoint library item is approved.

As part of the flow, I update certain properties of the item. However, these updates reset the item’s Approval Status back to “Not submitted”. To handle this, I attempt to re‑approve the item programmatically.

For re‑approval, I added two Send an HTTP request to SharePoint actions:

1.Create approval request

URI - _api/SP.Approvals.CreateItemRequest
Body - 
{
  "creationInfo": {
    "listId": "<List Id>",
    "itemId": "<Item Id>",
    "approvers": "<Service account Id>",
    "title": "<File name with extension>",
    "details": "Automatic request",
    "markDocAsFinal": true
  }
}

2.Approve approval request

URI - api/SP.Approvals.ApproveItemRequest
Body -
{
  "listId": "<List Id>",
  "itemId": "<Item Id>",
  "approvalId": "@{body('Send_an_HTTP_request_to_SharePoint')?['d']['CreateItemRequest']}",
  "comments": "Automatic approval"
}

The issue is that this re‑approval works intermittently. Most of the time, the flow fails with the following error:
“Action 'Send_an_HTTP_request_to_SharePoint_-_Create_request' failed: Creating new approval request is not allowed if item is in Pending or Approved state.”

This happens even though the Get item properties action immediately before this step returns the item’s Approval Status as “Not submitted”.

Question

What could be the cause of this inconsistent behavior, and how can it be fixed?

It appears that SharePoint sometimes still treats the item as Pending or Approved, even though the Approval Status column shows “Not submitted” when retrieved via Get item properties.

Please find the attached screenshot for reference.

Categories:

Building flows

Using connectors

I fed this question to my claude agent and it built the demo list/docx/flow.

The issue is your Get item properties returns the custom "Approval status" column you set up, showing "Not submitted". But Send an HTTP request → _api/SP.Approvals.CreateItemRequest checks SharePoint's system OData__ModerationStatus field (and the SP.Approvals backend keyed off it). The two drift out of sync - especially after a prior approval completes, gets cancelled, or the custom column is updated independently.

For you to test: Get the same item via raw REST with both fields selected:
GET _api/web/lists(guid'<list>')/items(<id>)?$select=ApprovalStatus,OData__ModerationStatus

You'll likely see ApprovalStatus="Not submitted" while OData__ModerationStatus=0 (Approved) or 2 (Pending). That divergence is the root cause.

To illustrate. For this example item. The custom field (in sharepoint list ApprovalStatus) is Draft. But the systemOData Approval is Pending.