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Approval that requires everyone to approve requires that the Approval Outcome list "Approve,Approve" and not just "Approve" Why is that?

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Posted on by Ryan-Berens-NAL

Creating an Approval process of a SharePoint list item. I reviewed this article: Create an approval flow that requires everyone to approve(contains video) - Power Automate | Microsoft Docs. I'm noting that my logic after the approval isn't working as expected.

Expected: Per the article when 2 or more people "approve", then the Approval outcome should equal "Approve".

Current: When 2 ore more people "approve" the Approval Outcome lists N "Approve" where N is the number of separate approvers.

What's happening here? Is this expected? Should the video in the link above be updated?

Here's what i needed to make this work:

Summary: In the condition step, I need to add text that CONCATENATES all the responses from all approvers in order to satisfy the YES condition. The documentation I've read doesn't describe this. Can anyone confirm? What other details should I keep an eye out for?

Thank you!

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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When the Everyone must approve was first released it did work the way the video describes. But that is an old demo. The values in Outcome have changed.

When you set an approval for Everyone must approve then the outcome is always a comma delimited string of the responses. So if you send it to two people the Outcome will be Approve, Approve. If you send it to three the outcome will be "Approve, Approve, Approve". If someone rejects the approval then the outcome will be a string of the responses so far. So if you send it to three people and the first approves and the second rejects then the outcome will be "Approve, Reject" and it won't wait for the third response. The way I test for approvals is to test whether Outcome CONTAINS "Reject". Then it doesn't matter how many approvers there are. If everyone approves then it won't contain "Reject". If one person does then it will be rejected.

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Ryan-Berens-NAL 12 on at

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Thanks @Pstork1 . Certainly, it would be nice if this was reflected in documentation, but thanks for your suggestion.

While we're here, any good resources that help to frame time-to-value or long-term scalability in using Approvals Templates within Teams vs MS Lists + Approvals + Power Automate? I'm looking to explore best-practices and there seems to be a big investment in the Teams app approach, but I'm finding that user interaction with fields, data and views seem to be lacking in that approach (vs the MS List approach). Thanks in advance for any insight you have here!

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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I've reported the issue with the documentation and hopefully it will get fixed fairly soon. The video is correct for the way approval outcome worked when it was first released. The problem is that documentation, especially videos, don't get updated if the capability changes.

I don't have any particular resources to recommend and I'm not sure I follow what you mean by Approvals Templates vs MS Lists. Approvals created for MS lists also show up in the Teams Approval app. So its not really an either or situation. Mostly I think it matters more what you are trying to get approved and where your user's spend all their time.

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Ryan-Berens-NAL 12 on at

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@Pstork1 Thanks for the follow up! I understand it's hard to keep things updated.

As for the difference - I think the key for me is whether or not users want to revisit Approvals or sort and group by template. Currently, this isn't available when using Templates from the Approvals Teams app, it's only available using Microsoft Lists.

If users could sort/filter approvals by template in case of a need to find an one, that would make the process easier for most of our use cases (though some other will invariably require the flexibility of Power Automate).

Either way - thanks!

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