Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Good morning Power Automate people,

I am programming a rather large Flow that sends out five (5) approval emails, to five (5) different people, when an item is submitted on SharePoint.

I would also like to have functionality that sends a reminder email after 48 hours to any of the five (5) people who have not completed the approval.

I have programmed Approval and the reminder function in a way that seems common from what I have seen online - a String Variable for each approval, initialized with the value set to Pending, and set to Complete when the Approval is completed, alongside a Do Until loop that checks if the variable is equal to Complete, and if it is not set to Complete (which obviously it would not be set to Complete at the onset), there is a 48 hour delay before a Condition checks the Variable to see if it is equal to Pending. If it is equal to Pending, it sends the reminder email.

The programming seems fine, but there is a small snag: if everyone completes their approval within an hour, let's say, the Flow will still wait the full 48 hours before moving onto the next section of the flow. I had anticipated/hoped that, once the Approvals were completed and the Variables were set to Complete, it would automatically resolve the Do Until loops so that the Flow could continue.

Here are some screenshots of my current Flow programming:

Here are 3 of the 5 approvals (couldn't zoom out far enough to show all of them) with their Do Until Loops, side by side.

A closer look at the Action Cards before/after the Approval. You can see the VarContainmentApproval Variable is initialized above as Pending, and set to Complete after the completion of the Approval

Now a closer look at the Do Until Loop. As you can see, the Do Until loop, which runs parallel to the Approval card, is set up to first check if the Variable is set to Complete, which of course right away it would not be, then, it waits 48 hours, and a Condition is used to check if the Variable is equal to Pending. If it is not, nothing happens, so that the flow can continue.

This behaviour was unexpected - I have a much simpler Flow with a Do Until loop set up to handle a reminder in the exact same way, but without this issue. The only difference being, in that Flow, there is only 1 Approval email - not 5 concurrent ones. Perhaps that is the source of the issue?

Any insight that anyone can provide would be super appreciated.

EDIT: Another screenshot showing the Do Until loop still waiting the 48 hours, despite the variable being set to complete: