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Error in standard approval workflow

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Posted on by RussH

Hello,

I have created one of the "out of the box" document approval workflows for SharePoint. The workflow is joined to a specific library, and a user can initiate the workflow manually on a document. Apart from configuring the location for the flow (Sharepoint site and library), I have altered nothing in the workflow.

But when running, the flow gives an error when the email detailing the completion of the workflow (approved or rejected, or in Dutch "goedgekeurd/afgewezen") is to be sent. I continually get this error: "Action 'Item_approved' failed: The 'inputs.parameters' of workflow operation 'Item_approved' of type 'OpenApiConnection' is not valid. Error details: Input parameter 'emailMessage/To' is required to be of type 'String/email'. The runtime value '"cnVzcy5oZXJhbGRAbW4ubmw="' to be converted doesn't have the expected format 'string/email'."

Searching various proposals in this forum haven't helped me yet, except to see that the same kind of error occurs in various kinds of workflows. I am something of a neophyte in this, I admit, and so don't always understand the logic of various segments in the flows themselves (yet).

Below are some screen shots of the workflow, the initialization variables, and the error itself. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Building flows

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Expiscornovus 33,175 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Error in standard approval workflow

That is the encoded version of the email address value (x-ms-user-email-encoded). Try using the x-ms-user-email one instead.

Try the below expression to retrieve that specific property.

triggerOutputs()?['headers']?['x-ms-user-email']

Happy to help out 😁

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RussH 28 on at

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Error in standard approval workflow

Yes, that did it! I took the expression you gave and added it as an expression. Works perfectly now. Many thanks!

BBut I am a bit puzzled why the original expression didn't work there. It was the "out of the box" expression given by the workflow itself. I seems rather strange to include an expression in a publicly available workflow which doesn't work. But perhaps I'm thinking a bit simplistically about this.

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Expiscornovus 33,175 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Error in standard approval workflow

Yes, the description of that dynamic content field does not reflect what it actually is, an encoded user email value.

Imho, the display name of that field should have been User email encoded instead of User email, this way people know what they are using. But that requires a change in the action of this SharePoint connector by the author, in this case Microsoft. That would be feedback for Microsoft.

Btw, you could also use the encoded one in your setup as well. Only in that case you would need to decode it back to a string with a base64ToString function. 😁

base64ToString(triggerOutputs()?['headers']?['x-ms-user-email-encoded'])

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