Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Approval Flow bypassed by SharePoint native approval options

Hi,

I have created an approval flow in PA which is manually triggered from within a SP Doc Library. This was required as we needed

To notify nominated individuals (lookup column with associated email addresses) of the pending approval depending on the type of document so they could approve/reject
Upon successful approval, additional columns needed to be updated accordingly

The issue is somewhat usability based where even though some training and awareness may mitigate it, that is deemed unacceptable by "the business".

So here's the issue.

As we have approval enabled on the document library, when a user selects a document they wish to submit for approval, there are multiple options available to them.

They can select the PA approval workflow from the 'Automate' option in the menu at the top of the library
They can click the native 'Submit for approval' button in the menu at the top of the library
They can click the three dots at the file and select 'Publish' which will submit the document for approval

We want users to go with option 1 above. However, if a user chooses option 2 or 3 then they bypass our PA approval workflow and nobody is notified of the approval. Whats more, if any of the approvers happen to see a document is pending approval and they then approve through the SP interface, then the columns are not updated (as per requirement 2 at the top of this post).

So my question to the many people smarter than myself here is how can we address this issue so that all roads lead to option 1 above i.e. our PA approval workflow.

Seems like there must be a way to get around the native controls bypassing a custom approval workflow.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

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