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Long running approvals - How long after an approval is created will the Wait for Approval action work?

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Posted on by baylo

Can the flow action "wait for an approval" be triggered even if the approval was created by a different flow more than 30 days ago?

I would like to perform long running approvals (more than 30 days) by having 1 flow which which creates an approval, then waits for that approval, then if that wait action times out after 28 days, http post is made to another flow passing in the approval ID. Then the second flow begins with the wait for an approval action and so on.

I know that the approvals live in CDS much longer than flows can run for and I was hoping that the "wait for an approval" action was like a webhook which would resume my "listening" flow.

It's a little hard to test having recently cleared approvals older than 30 days, having build up of old approvals linking to expired flows is what I'm hoping to avoid by doing this.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Re: Long running approvals - How long after an approval is created will the Wait for Approval action work?

@baylo- I was running into this same issue, but I was using SharePoint lists/libraries for mine. While it might not be a silver bullet, you might be able to use the same concept. This does require the ability to access the Dataverse, but if you can get in there it might work for you:
In the Power Automate flow, use "Create Approval" rather than "Start and Wait for an approval"
Save the Approval GUID ("Approval Title" or msdyn_flow_approval_title) to the record you are requesting approval on - I was able to just create a string field in the SP list item, so you might need to get creative on this one
Format the title with an identifier that allows you to pull it out of the CDS/Dataverse
In a second flow, create a trigger using "Dataverse" connection - when a row is added, modified, or deleted
Change type = Update
Table name = Approvals
Scope = Organization
Row filter = use Odata query to pull out just the approvals you want to trigger on. In this case, I was looking just at our Vendors site, for approval records that were COMPLETE, and excluding any that I had tagged with "Create" in the title (used for a different Flow)
After getting those records, get your approval responses with a Dataverse "Get Rows" action
The table you're looking getting rows for is "Approval Responses"
Filter your rows to only those that match the approvalid of the approval above (see screenshot for clarification)
From here, create variables for any of the approval response data you want to get (Approver, Approval date, Comments, Approval Result, etc.)
Because the Get Rows action is built to pull back multiple records, you'll need to use a For Each statement to write the data from the Approval Response data
If you want the user information from the Approver Response, you'll have to look it up from the GUID provided in the Approval Response data by using a "Get Row" (singular) from the Users table in the Dataverse and pass in the Owner value of the approval request
From there, you can do whatever you want with the data, using the variables
I hope that helps. The relationship between Approvals, Approval Requests, and Approval Responses in the dataverse is kinda funky. Hope this helps!
Javier Gallego on at

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Re: Long running approvals - How long after an approval is created will the Wait for Approval action work?

Hi Baylo,

There was an update with a solution let you to have more days.

I hope it can helps you:

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/2019-release-wave-2-plan-and-may-updates-for-microsoft-flow/

Long-lived Approvals and other approval improvements

Flows make it easy to automate workflows that request approvals and act on responses to them. Currently, flow runs time-out after 30 days, causing any pending steps (like approvals) to time-out as well. While this isn’t a problem for most approvals, there are cases where responding to an approval can take longer than 30 days.

With approvals stored in the Common Data Service, you can now create flows that act on responses to approval requests, even after the original flow run has timed-out. To do this, you can use two flows – one to send an approval request and the other to run business logic on the outcome of the approval once responses to it have been received – based on the new “v2” Create an approval action.

Read more here to get step-by-step instructions on how to create approval processes that run indefinitely.

Cancel sent approvals

There are some cases when you’ve sent out an approval request, but you want to retract it. Possibly you made a mistake in the request, or it’s no longer relevant. In that case, the sender of a request can now Cancel an approval they’ve sent.

Simply click on the approval and there will be a Cancel approval button in the side pane. You can always see the approval tasks that have been cancelled by selecting the History tab.

Note that this new feature only works with the Create an approval (v2) operation.

Regards,

JAvier