issue with do until on start and wait for an approval -Reminder concept

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Posted on by karolmax

Hi Guys!

How works <do until> with some approval task? My intention is to send some reminders when the approver is taking any action.

in Do until i have got 5 counts (loops) with 15 min - so my understanding is that in a 15min of time I would send 1 reminder mail. But instead I am sending reminders for each minute :) Despite info which I have read regarding<Do until> I am a bit confused.

Today I realized that I need to re-design ( for now now idea how) this step because even Approver has approved I need to wait to complete the whole loop. Previously I was testing for 1/2/3min so I did not realized that - when I changed that for real time 7 days I saw that after approval I am awaiting 7 days to go further...

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David_MA 12,982 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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I am not really following what you are doing. However, a Do Until action runs until it meets the condition specified in the action. Here is an example of how I use it to send reminders with an approval:

To do this, your approval needs to be parallel to the Wait for an approval action.

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karolmax 92 on at

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@David_MA

I have something similar - but as you can see I am using start and wait for an approval - maybe because of multiple approvers.

When approver approves he is excluded from the reminder part - that works - but I dont want to wait in the loop where delay will be 5/7 days when all approvers are completed/approved.

From your screenshot I see that there is daily reminder?

P.S In general I followed this Individual Approval Task Reminders - Approval Flow (youtube.com) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZupQ0AbDl0I - and especially here people are dealing with the same issue - when there is loop:

"i think i found flaw in the reminder pattern...
since we are telling the do until to wait for 1 day before our reminder check, my flow is stuck running for atleast 1 day before it will complete, even if my user has approved within 5 minutes.
How would u terminate the do until early if the item was approved?"

"I have followed a similar pattern for sending reminders using the send email with options. My problem is, even if there is a response after 5 minutes my Flow still waits 24 hours before checking the variable. This is too long for me. I need a way of forcing the Flow to proceed after a response without waiting for the reminder period."

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David_MA 12,982 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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You'll need to explain your logic on the variables you are using for the do until and how you update them so the action knows when to stop. It appears you are doing something more complicated than it needs to be.

The way I do this is to create a Boolean variable Approvals Completed and set the default value to false (send reminders). After the Approval action, the first thing you would do is set the Approvals Completed variable to true (stop reminders). You show multiple conditions in the condition in the do until action. It should just check if Reminders eq true. If yes, send the reminder and then it will loop again.

Since you are sending the approvals to multiple people, I don't know how to prevent sending the reminder to everyone including everyone who has already replied. To do that you'd need to figure out how to get the responses out of the approvals table in Dataverse and then create a variable to populate it with the e-mail addresses of those who have not yet responded. This is not something I have needed to do as every solution I have, the approval either waits for the first response or it is only sent to one person at a time.

Note, when you have it working correctly, your workflow will show it is still running after all responses have been received because the do until action will run until it hits its next pass. If you don't want to do this, at the end of the path under the approval, end it with a terminate flow action and choose success.

P.S. Are you being notified when you get a response in new community forums? I have not received any notifications since the new forums launched and I have every notification checked to send in my profile.

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David_MA 12,982 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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P.S. you mentioned you thought my process is sending daily reminders. I actually create an integer variable and set a default value. In the example below, the default for reminders to begin is seven days. Once the reminders start sending, the reminder is sent every two days. This is what the set variable action does in the do until action. Of course, if your process needs daily reminders you wouldn't need to do this, but this allows a bit more flexibility as to when the reminders begin and then how often they're sent. You would use the variable to set the value in the delay action.

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