Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

I'm new to Power Automate and started from the SharePoint list template 'Travel requests with approvals'.

But soon faced a problem where the trip had been approved, any subsequent changes to the list item (fill in hotel etc) reverted the approval status to "Not submitted".

So we've turned off built-in approvals and setup a "persistent" approval flow using Power Automate... when the list item is submitted an approval flow is triggered that then sets the value of a new column "ApprovalStatus" accordingly.

So far, so good.

How can we protect the "ApprovalStatus" column from tampering? i.e. block manual setting to "Approved" or "Rejected" outside of the flow?

Feels like this should be a common request but can't find any articles covering this scenario.

Otherwise, maybe there is a better approach?

Thank you!

Categories:

Building flows

The question is really related to SharePoint rather than Power Automate at this point, which is probably why you are not finding an answer in the forums. But you need to do two things:

Go to the list settings and choose advanced settings. Go to the quick editing setting and set it to no:
1. This prevents people from editing the value within the list view. It hides the edit in grid view option in the list.
Provided you are using the standard SharePoint list form, you then need to hide this field on the form. Open any item in the list and choose the Edit columns setting from this menu:
1. Uncheck the box next to the Approval Status column, which will hide this field on the list form.

Your other option, which is trickier, is to customize the list form using Power Apps. There are alternatives but those require the purchase of third-party tools that allow you to customize SharePoint forms, such as Nintex Forms and PlumSail Forms. We use Nitnex, which allows me to make the field read only on the SharePoint form.