Approval reminder email using parallel branch

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Posted on by lukas.schauffele

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Hi guys

I am building an approval process which sends the approver a reminder halfway before the approval expires and is escalated to someone else. Say, Wait for an approval has a timeout of 24 hours. I want to send a notification to the user 12 hours after the approval was started.

My issue is that once the user has actioned the approval, flow is waiting for the delay branch to finish before continuing. Worst case scenario, that would mean a delay of close to 12 hours. The approval process is only the first part of the entire flow and I need it to proceed as quickly as possible.

I've thought of setting a variable to indicate the user has approved the approval but that doesn't help when the delay action has already been initiated.

Anyone has an answer to this?

Cheers

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lukas.schauffele 186 on at

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Hey @v-bacao-msft

Thank you for your reply. The linked solution didn't quite solve my issue because I still had to wait for the notification branch to finish.

I have come up with the solution below.

When the approval starts, I set two variables
TimeToNotification - the time I want the notification to send out (approval request date + duration)
SetNotification - boolean to specify current approver has been sent a notification
The notification loop runs every two minutes. Inside the loop we check if TimeToNotification is greater than utcNow() (converted to ticks) and if the SetNotification is true (i.e. the current approver has not been sent a notification yet).

All my initial approaches had the delay to notification in the right-hand branch and I had to wait until it finished before continuing with the flow. With the current approach I am waiting a maximum of 2 minutes. The only downside is that because of the looping limits, my approval has a maximum duration of 7 days (if I want to wait 2 minutes).

I'm not sure if this is the right way to go about it, any feedback is appreciated.

Lukas

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v-bacao-msft on at

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Hi @LKS ,

When creating an approval email reminder, we generally configure the Approval action outside of Do Until.

Add a parallel branch, configure Approval action and Do until in two branches.

Use variables to record Approval status and use variables to control the loop.

Please refer to the methods provided in this similar thread to configure your Flow.

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Power-Automate/Reminder-Email-to-Approver/m-p/151964

If you have any questions, please let us know.

Best Regards,

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