Best Approach to actions which wait for responses

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Posted on by Mattw112b

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There are a couple actions in Power automate that state to wait... adaptive cards, approval flows...

The problem is we send these out to a bunch of people, but it never progresses to the next person because it is waiting for a response?

For example... I do a list... get a bunch of people names and we want to send an adaptive card to each and wait for a response... how would we do that so that everyone doesn't get held up when someone doesn't respond.

Same with wait for response to approval... we have a list with a bunch of date entries, and we want to send out an approval to people with dates passed a certain time and ask them if they still need this item or not... but how do we send that out multuple times in one flow instance?

Thanks,

Terry

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Building flows

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takolota1 4,974 Moderator on at

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Why doesn’t the Start and wait for an approval with multiple Assigned to inputs not work for this?

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takolota1 4,974 Moderator on at

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If you need to do other actions for people who responded, while still waiting for responses from others, then this may be possible for up to 50 sets of approvers (so if you needed 100 approvers, you could do groups of 2 where one would have to respond before the second, but they only have to wait for that one other person).

You will need an array of approver email addresses or a list of the addresses you can use the split expression on to create an array.
Then you will want to use an Apply to each with that array of email addresses. In the Apply to each use the Create and wait for an approval action, set it to Everyone must approve, and put the Current item (the email address) in the Assigned to field.

Now here is the important thing. You must go to this Apply to each loop settings and turn on concurrency and set the concurrency to the maximum 50 branches. This will allow up to 50 of these approvals to go out at once and allow other actions in the Apply to each loop to continue for each branch with a response while the other branches are still waiting on responses.

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takolota1 4,974 Moderator on at

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This is also possible to do with the Create Approval and Wait for Approval type actions, but you will also need an array variable and a second Apply to each loop.

First create the same Apply to each set-up in my previous response, but use the Create approval action instead and add an Append to variable action to collect an array of Approval IDs.

Then create a second Apply to each loop. Use the variable with the array of Approval IDs as the output from previous steps. Then add a Wait for an approval action and input the Current item of this second Apply to each in the Approval ID field.

Here you must go to the settings of both the Apply to each loops and turn on concurrency and set the concurrency to the maximum of 50. If the loops run sequentially and not concurrently then the loop with the Wait for approval action will fail whenever an approver responds before their branch is run/before their Wait for approval action is triggered.

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takolota1 4,974 Moderator on at

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And actually, if you can use parallel branches, each with their own Apply to Each and skip & take functions to split your approvers array into batches of 50, then you can do up to 50 x 50 = 2500 of these at once.

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