I have an elaborate multi-tier (and multiple approvers per tier) approval flow which has been highly appreciated by my organization (4000+ approval requests done in last 3 years), but now I got an interesting feature request:
"As approver I would like to be able to ask a question prior to making the decision to approve or reject."
Has anyone build something that support this? Is there an other "action" available that does support such a behavior???
There is nothing built in to handle asking a question before approving. I would educate your approvers to pick up the phone or send an e-mail to the requester for clarification before they approve or reject. Otherwise, you could create an approval with custom values of Approve, Reject, Need More Information. If you do that, what you do next could vary. When I use this method, if more information is selected, it sends an e-mail to the requester with the comments from the approval (no way to make comments required). When the person has provided the necessary information, the approval is initiated again. This approach takes multiple workflows and customization to the SharePoint form to implement.
There is then another workflow that does the same thing, but uses the trigger when an item or file is modified that has trigger conditions, which all must evaluate to true:
When this flow runs, it resets the above values so the flow cannot trigger again unless of course when the approval is done again the approver chooses Changes Required again.
You could probably do this within a Do Until action and the outcome is not equal to changes required, but you need to keep in mind that the workflows has a timeout limit of 30 days and approvals have a timeout of 28 days. We use multiple flows because then each round has a max timeout of 28 days.
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