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Has anyone ever had luck in creating a fully automated approval flow that stops the autosave loop?

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Posted on by Laurelp

Has anyone come up with a fully automated (without user pressing a button, status change or check in/out) to send an approval on a document that has autosave turned on without it creating multiple loops every time the document saves? I can't seem to find a trigger that works because of how the document approval feature locks the document until it's approved.

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David_MA 12,982 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Please share an image of your flow configuration and especially the approval portion and trigger if below does not answer your question. That will help to better understand your issue. I am guessing you have a trigger when a document is created or modified, and this is triggering the flow every time.

You will probably need to do something that is outlined here, which is for handling an infinite loop: How to avoid infinite trigger loop in Power Automate. It sounds like this is what you are experiencing. A simple thing would be to add a yes/no field named PendingApproval to the document library with a default value of no. When your flow triggers, you would update the field to true. When the approval is completed, set it back to false so it can run again for the next run.

Then add two trigger conditions as outlined in the above blog post:

The first will be where PendingApproval is equal to false: @equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/PendingApproval'], false)

Since you don't want the users to have to toggle anything to run the flow, you will need another so that when you update the above back to false after the approval has completed, you will need to add something else, so the update does not trigger the approval again. As long as the account owner of the flow is not someone who is making changes to the document to trigger an approval, you can add a trigger condition to check if the current modifed by person is not the owner of the flow: @not(equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/Editor/Email'], 'flow.owner@domain.com'))

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Laurelp 4 on at

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Hi David and thanks for your response.

I tried that approach and with the approval workflow it appears to lock it down in a way when it's being edited that you can't modify the record. I get the error message A later version of this item has already been modified. Other users can not edit the item until that version is approved or published.

My workflow is fairly simple but I have tried moving steps around and many different triggers on version number, status etc but I think the doc approval locks it down once the process starts.

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