Approval Emails

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Posted on by Flyingfishnm

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Hi All

Is there a way to control, i.e. re-issue, an approval email? I have a power app that allows a person to kick off an approval flow for a document. What is happening is when a selected approver gets the initial email, they will not necessarily review the doc straight away, sometimes leaving it up to the last day of the approval period or it gets deleted for some reason. I'd like to offer the approver the opportunity to re-issue the same approval email so the recipient can approve/reject the design.

Any suggestions much welcomed!

cheers!

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Power Apps Pro Dev & ISV

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cchannon 4,702 Moderator on at

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2 answers:
The Approvals app in Teams is actually just a CDS/Dataverse App that gets deployed to your default environment (link). So, find that environment and you can write any PowerAutomate queries you want against it so you can write your own PA Flow that manages the reminder emails.
OR, if you don't have access to the default environment, you can still accomplish this with PA Flow, although admittedly it is pretty kludgy and I wouldn't recommend you take this approach at scale:
Create your PA Flow to fire the approval on whatever trigger you want, then initialize a variable (we'll call it Complete)
Now add a step to Create and Await the approval, then Update Complete to true and do whatever else you do when an approval comes in.
Now come back up to the create and await step and add a parallel branch. Add a Delay step for however long you want to wait (5 days maybe?) and then add a condition check to see if Complete is true. If true, do nothing. If false, send an alert email
Again, if you will be operating this at scale, definitely query the CDS database directly to get your info; I haven't seen big problems since the modernization to Flow, but I still bear the scars of trying to rely on tons of waiting Workflows and I will never trust an async process to handle long term waits at scale again.

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Flyingfishnm 111 on at

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Hi
Thanks for you reply!
What you say is interesting. I'm fairly new to this Power Platform so I'm trying to understand what goes on behind the scenes. I'm not using the Teams approval, just the normal one which is kicked off via Power Automate. Is that action also embedded in the CDS?

Cheers!
dj

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cchannon 4,702 Moderator on at

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They're precisely the same thing. When you kick one of those off from PowerAutomate, the Approval app will show it in Teams right away.

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Flyingfishnm 111 on at

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Ok, so do you have an example of how to query the CDS to see/interrogate the approval app?

thanks!
dj

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cchannon 4,702 Moderator on at

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Sure. It's actually much easier than you'd expect. PowerAutomate has baked-in operators for Common Data Service / Dataverse that make it incredibly easy. In your Trigger or Action, just search for "common" and the Common Data Service operations will all show up.

From there, you will need to select an Organization to create a connection. This may be where you get stuck because you might not (probably don't) have access to the Default Environment. You will probably need to ask your administrator to add you as a user in this environment with a role that gives you access to these records. And before you ask: no, I don't know what table names to tell your admin you need. I would assume, though, that they have some fairly predictable set of names like, "approval" and "request".

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