Approval limitations?

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Posted on by Dimmy

Has anyone come across any limitations using the Approvals connecter in Power Automate / Teams?

In particular,

I'm trying to send an approval request to 7 people where only 1 needs to approve.

To populate this field, my flow uses (In a parallel action before approval step) the Office 365 Groups connecter to list the members of my Approver group then using an Apply to Each, I'm appending the emails to a string variable using ; as a separator.

My issue is that only 5 out of the 7 people received this request...

I can use the Audit feature in Office365 Admin > Compliance to see who viewed the Approval request but I can't seem to find a way to see who actually got the request just to check IF the flow didn't populate the "Assign To" field in time.

Any ideas?

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grantjenkins 11,059 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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Re: Approval limitations?

There are three tables in Dataverse that contain relevant information about your approvals.

Approvals has the main information about the approval.
Approval Requests contains each of the people that received a request
Approval Responses contains each of the responses. If first to approve it this would only contain a single response. If all must approve then it would contain all responses up until/if someone rejected, etc.

See flow below that can get information on a specific approval by passing in the Approval Id as input.

The Trigger takes in a single input of type string - the Approval Id that you want to get information for.

The List rows approvals gets data from the Approvals table filtering on the property:

msdyn_flow_approvalid

Because we can potentially get more than one row, we can use a Apply to each to iterate over the rows. In this case there will always be one at most.

Then we can just get the rows from the Approval Requests and Approval Responses tables filtering on the Approval Id. The filter columns are:

msdyn_flow_approvalrequestidx_approvalid
msdyn_flow_approvalresponseidx_approvalid
Dimmy 31 on at

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Re: Approval limitations?

Hi @v-xiaochen-msft , that is a good find! will keep this in mind!
Thanks for passing that on.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to hold who received the approval request (Unless I'm doing something stupid).

I think what is making this difficult for me is that I'm using Flow to create an approval request on behalf of another person and sending that approval to 7 other individuals.

Kind regards,

Dimmy
v-xiaochen-msft on at

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Re: Approval limitations?

Hi @Dimmy ,

Actually, the approval request are stored in dataverse 'Approval request' table.

Best Regards,

Wearsky
Dimmy 31 on at

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Re: Approval limitations?

@v-xiaochen-msft
My flow is initiated by a API call to Power Automate which I pass through the initiator's UPN for me to set as the "requester" for my approval step.

@grantjenkins and @v-xiaochen-msft
I think my only way around this is to add a service account to the "assign to" field so that I can use it as a means to monitor who receives the request.

Thanks for the help 😁
grantjenkins 11,059 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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Re: Approval limitations?

To check who was assigned you can go back into your flow run and click on the Start and wait for an approval to see all the details. This should show you everyone that was assigned. If it doesn't include everyone you expect then click on each of your append actions to see if some of them have empty emails, etc.
v-xiaochen-msft on at

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Re: Approval limitations?

Hi @Dimmy ,

I created an approval with 7 approver and they all received the approve.

You can see it in teams approval app.

Best Regards,

Wearsky