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Record Multiple Approval Responses

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Posted on by KEH

I am new to flows, so am getting a bit turned around!

I have an approval flow that is manually triggered on a project summary document. This goes out to a large list of team leads, who indicate if their team needs to be involved in the project. So far, this works fine.

However, I would like to record the responses somewhere where colleagues with no Automate knowledge can easily see them (as this approval process will be used by a number of people).

20 people may approve this, and 10 may not.

We need to see, with ease, who has responded and what their response was. That way we know who needs to be kept informed by their own choice, not just who we think should be in the loop! We can also chase non-responders.

Is this something that can be done, and what do you think is the best and most efficient way to handle it?

Thank you!

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Building flows

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Pstork1 68,707 Most Valuable Professional on at

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I normally do that by adding a multiline field to the document library where the document is stored. Then when you do the approval you collect the responses and who they are from by appending them to a string variable. That can then be used at the end of the approval to update the field in the document library for the document. So anyone viewing the document in SharePoint can see all the approvals and comments.

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KEH 11 on at

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Would I follow something like this:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Flows/How-to-see-the-document-approval-progress-in-SharePoint-library/td-p/682048?

I've followed this, but the status hasn't updated.

Any ideas where I've gone wrong?

Thank you!

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Pstork1 68,707 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Are you approving a file or a list item? Your first screenshot was for a list item, but your description says its a document. If its a file the flow would look more like this

The yes side of the condition would then look like this

1) Get the file metadata to retrieve the current ETag

2) Use that ETag to set the content approval status

3) Then update other file properties normally.

You would have something similar on the No side to set the approval rejection.

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KEH 11 on at

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Great, thanks for the response! It's definitely writing properly now. If I wanted to summarise all the responses, such as name and response, what would be the best way to do this?

E.g.
Joe Bloggs - Yes
Jo Bloggson - No
Joey Blogfort - Yes

It's worth noting that the list of respondents is large!

Thanks a ton for your help so far. 🙂

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Pstork1 68,707 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Sorry, my previous response was actually meant for another post, but got posted in the wrong place. To record responses mentioned earlier do the following

In SharePoint create a multiline text field. It can store up to about 64000 characters.

1) Create a string variable

2) Use an Apply to each loop to process the responses when they are returned by the approval

3) in the Loop append the information you want from the current response to the string variable you created. Make sure to add a carriage return at the end of the dynamic content. It will look like you are appending a line of content and a blank line, but that's just the carriage return.

4) After exiting the loop update the SharePoint Multiline text field with the variable.

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KEH 11 on at

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Brill, thanks a ton!

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