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Flow Approval with Reminders and Deadline

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Posted on by ChadVKealey

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Scenario:
As a University, we have a number of Request/Approval processes that run per specific cycles (e.g.: Terms, of which we have 4 per year, 3 months each). We've been using Flow and Approvals and it has helped a lot, but we still have many cases where Approvers ignore or forget to Approve Requests, so we'd like to add reminders and also a deadline at which point a "default" outcome (Rejected) is applied.

Constants:

All requests have one single Approver
There is a fixed deadline per request cycle (Term 1 deadline is March 30th, Term 2 deadline is June 30th, etc.)
Requests not acted upon by the deadline are Rejected

Process:

User submits a request
Approval is sent to Approver
Approver gets a reminder every X days until 1 day before the deadline
One day before deadline, Approver gets a "Final Reminder" message indicating that it will be Rejected if no action taken
On deadline, request is Rejected and Flow is terminated

So, I started with this Flow of the Week as inspiration and came up with the Flow shown in THIS VIDEO.

It works, but there are a few issues (some of these are mentioned in that video, others are not):

The Reminder emails continue even after the "Final Reminder" email is sent (more noticeable with the accelerated timeframe I'm using for testing, may not be an issue in prod since reminder cycles will be more like several days up to a week)
The Approval is still "out there" in the Flow Approvals center, leading the Approver to believe they can still take action (ie: There is no mechanism to "recall" or "cancel" an Approval)
Having the Flow "Fail" is not ideal from a diagnostic standpoint. That is, it would not be readily apparent which Flows just hit the deadline and which actually Failed (potentially needing intervention and/or updating of the Flow)
The Timeout for the Approval must be set to a static duration. Ideally, having a "Deadline" option would be perfect, but, failing that, the ability to use Dynamic Data in that Timeout field would suffice (ie: the duration could be calculated at runtime as the number of days between the current date and the deadline).

I also think that my solution is overly complicated and, if it's possible to have compound conditions (e.g.: "var_ApprovalDone is False AND nowUTC() < ApprovalDeadline"), that would simplify things a bit

Categories:

Building flows

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v-yuazh-msft on at

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Hi @ChadVKealey,

Could you please share a screenshot of the configuration of your flow?

Have you managed to achieve your requirement?

As you have listed, maybe the approval in microsoft flow couldn't achieve your requirement fully.

Please share more details about your flow and we would try to provide a proper workaround for you.

Best regards,

Alice

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ChadVKealey 1,393 on at

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It's kind of laid out in the video, but here are some static screen shots of the major functional parts (the parallel brances).

The Approval branch. This one is pretty straightforward. It would be fantastic if the Timeout property for the Approval could be populated dynamically and/or it could be set as a date-time value rather than an amount of time. However, I don't suspect that will change.

The "Reminder" branch with the Do Until loop and appropriate Delay actions. The Timeout property for the Do Until loop does allow dynamic data, so I'd like to set that as the amount of time between the time the flow starts and the Approval Deadline value (from the SP list) so that this loop will time out, thus stopping the "regular" reminder emails and then sending the "final" reminder email.

The Delay Until branch, which waits until the Final Reminder Time (calculated as 1 minute before the Approval Deadline for testing, but would actually be 1 day before the deadline in practical use). As stated above, if I can find an appropriate expression to set the Timeout property for the 'Reminder' Do Until loop, the Final Reminder email action would be moved to that branch and simplify things a bit.

Finally, the "Default Outcome" branch. This defines what would happen if the Approval is not completed before the Approval Deadline. The only problem here is that terminating the Flow allows three status choices: Failed, Completed or Cancelled. Failed allows for a "code" and a "message", but it's not clear where that information is displayed or how it can be used. Completed and Cancelled do not allow for either of those. In practice, the Flows where I'll be implementing this are already writing data to a "log list" in SharePoint, so I can simply add an entry to that log indicating that the request is being rejected because it was not Approved before the deadline and then set the status to "Cancelled" (which, I think, is a better descriptor than "Failed" for the outcome; the Approver ignored the request and the reminders - and was warned that doing so would result in the request being Rejected - so the request was cancelled).

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