Microsoft 365 Community SharePoint, 3 Sep 2020

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From YouTube: Creating Microsoft Power Automate approvals with reminders in SharePoint

Description

In this 19-minute Developer-focused demo, Chakkaradeep (Chaks) Chandran open and runs Microsoft Power Automate flows within SharePoint. Easily request approvals on list items or documents and add approval reminders (month, week, day, minute) to drive timely approval completion. Collect approval transaction time stamps, approval results and comments. Render approval status in a formatted table. Mail content list item submitter when submission was approved/rejected. This PnP Community demo is taken from the General Microsoft 365 Development Special Interest Group (SIG) - Bi-weekly sync call recorded on September 3, 2020.

Demo Presenter: Chakkaradeep Chandran (Microsoft) | @chakkaradeep

Supporting materials:
• Request Approval Workflow | https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AHbVPoS644qOROM&cid=939A92F9AB7A681E&id=939A92F9AB7A681E%21226288&parId=939A92F9AB7A681E%21224475&action=locate

Learn more:
• Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/m365pnp-videos

A

So last week I tweeted about an approval flow that I built for a list item where or you know you could use it for documents as well, where it actually helps users to run an approval flow on a selected item and then have some really cool interesting options. Not just sending you know what is this approval about and and who are the approvers but also bring in approval reminders right. So if you have someone a task that is offended to them, uh you probably want to remind them.

A

um You know the the frequency that you want to remind them and send them that hey, you haven't approved this item. Do you want to approve like right now right? So um it was a little bit journey to to build this, but um it was really cool to see this working and um let's jump right into the demo and then let's go through and see how I built this flow. So here's my simple list. You know it still is new for these command goals.

A

But let's pretend that we're going to be approving uh cities here, um so I'm going to select our client and then, if you see here, I get my custom flow that I have booked for this list. So I'm going to do request approval with options and then um it's going to open up the flow run flow panel in sharepoint. So you don't have to go to flow, which is really cool thing and, let's say a new city in the horizon.

A

Please approve and I'm gonna put myself as the approver and let's ban this. uh Why not.

A

I'm going to turn on approval reminders, because without this you know an approval is going to be sent and you know vasa being visa is going to ignore this approval for sure right beta. So I'm going to turn on approval reminders and I'm going to make it send a reminder every minute so that we get an email reminder about this approval not being complete.

A

So I'm going to run the flow and mess up, don't approve. Yet, um let's, let's go through and get the spam to show this demo works. So I have my email, um I'm gonna, I'm not gonna open my email with a lot of stuff going on in my email, but I will bring in the just the email when I get um the approval and then things like that. But but here is the flow, um let's see what it's doing, because it should have running there.

A

You go it's running and we should get an email pretty soon to approve, let's see where the status. So, if you click the run flow, um you will see that where this is currently in there you go. I got uh the approval. Email was that, did you get the approval email as well.

B

I got your email.

A

Yeah, so here's the approval, email, uh it's no different to the current approvals that you go and use the action. It will send you, the the details of the approval, have customized to say that a new item you know offline was created. Of course there are some bugs here, but you know you can customize the message that you want. I also see the message I sent with the request right so which is a new city in the horizon.

A

Please approve um I could approve here, but let's not do that because we should be getting reminders uh very soon. I think vesa did you got the? Did you get the reminder.

B

A

So here's the reminder right so an approval assigned to you for offline is still pending. Please review the approval and if I click this, it's going to take me to the flow portal to to approve this request. Now, just for the fun. Let's wait another minute to see if we get another reminder um to to see if we actually like the flow works.

A

So that's that's a really cool way to keep people informed and I do have the option in the flow to save every minute or every day or every week to to kind of set the reminder. But one thing to really understand here: there's a limitation to how many days you can actually do this. So the longest running uh time for flow that can run is 30 days uh 29 days. There are ways to prevent those things, but right now, if you use an office license, you will get 29 days of loading one.

A

So I just got the next reminder: did you get the next reminder.

B

Yep, I got it so you're spamming, my inbox. Now this is getting.

A

Out exactly yeah, I'm saying I'm spamming this up inbox. So now I can go and uh you know respond to this request uh visa. Please go ahead and respond and leave something in the comments um so that when.

B

You do that yeah, I'm opening opening up. Well, I'm not opening up the list is opening up in my browser just to be precise and that wasn't that joke.

B

Adding a comment, and I will approve okay, I will approve.

B

Write a comment and confirm there: we go and response successfully recorded.

A

Okay, so now what is going to happen? Is it's going to take all the responses?

A

You know build it into a really nice looking table and then send the requester an email, um so I'm going to be waiting for the email to come through that I actually got because oh there's a bug, um there's a bug in my flow, but you can see um this shouldn't be rejected. It should be approved obviously, but you can see the the table here that it builds. um So it is showing me who the approver is.

A

um What are the comments uh thanks visa um and then response is approved, so this is just a flow bug that we can go fix when we edit the flow, but this is a this. Is the flow overall right, so you you go and you have a flow deploy for your list. You can now click that flow. Have the options in the flow itself on what reminders- and you know you want- and the frequency of the reminders you want, um so that it's really driving that business logic here.

A

um So really cool way to do this, so let's go and see what this flow looks like now. This flow isn't straightforward. There are a lot of capabilities here that you know you would expect to be part of the approval action in power automate. True, I do you know, I'm working with the power automate approval team that they're looking to bring these features as part of the action, um but right now we don't have it. So we got to build something to support these uh scenarios for customers.

A

So what I've done is you know for a selected item? One of the things you can do is add inputs and these inputs are uh today you have around seven types, and so you have text s or no file, email, number and date. The email is the one that will actually let you pick people uh and select emails.

A

Many customers have not recognized this as people picker, because the name doesn't say people speaker. um I I totally agree uh on that. So it's very confusing, but if you select email you can then have a people picker that enumerates people from your gal. So that's what I've done here. uh You know put a text message uh and then email and then sr no to turn on approval, reminders, the reminder, duration and then I have uh the combo box.

A

Sorry, the drop down list of options for approval, reminder, duration and really the way you bring drop down is, if you click text and then you click to start dot dot. You can add multi, selected, stuff options and also a drop down list of options. So you can convert this text box into drop down and multi-select list, which is very cool. You can also make this field optional, so you don't have to like really uh let the user enter. You might have some default setup in your flow as well.

A

um So that's the way you can use inputs, which I have used uh in my flow in the uh for selected items, and then I get the item now. Let's come to these variables later, but once I get the item, I have the details for the item that the user selected. Now I can create an approval right.

A

So now I'm going to branch into two parallel branches here to create an approval and send an approval, and the other one is to really see do I need to send a reminder for the sample world because one is going to initiate the approval and start the approval, and one of the branches which is here is going to check if the approval is complete or not.

A

So what I'm doing here is basically uh and checking um if approval is uh reminders is required right. So one of the input I got was whether I need approval to my desk for this flow, so that gives me a good hint to understand whether I do need to go into this logic or not. uh Otherwise, you know you don't have to simply remind us, you don't have to go into this logic and then immediately.

A

What I'm doing is I'm setting up a delay and the count is the duration right, whether it's uh month week, day or minute, and the values are exactly the same as how you get in the account drop down. So I've just mimicked that and the unit is basically whether it's one day or you know two days or one minute or three minutes depending on that, and once I get that the flow is going to stop for whatever set period of time, and once it comes back, it's going to check if approval is done right.

A

So to do that, I have a variable called approval.

A

Approval done, which initially is set up to fall right, because the way that you would do is when approval is complete. You would set that to true uh if it's not it's equal to false, so the first time when it runs it's going to be false and it's going to go ahead and say: well, I'm going to do this until the approval done is true, so now you go into a loop and it basically uh goes up and waits until uh that delay.

A

uh Basically, this is uh renamed, so you can say uh wait before sending emails right, because it's basically going to wait until uh that minute here, which I have defaulted to uh now. You can even change this. So to basically say I don't want minute, I can enter custom value and then you can pick the reminder, duration um and- and that would basically tell you whether this is for minute or day or count right, um and this is how this is, how you can basically customize this to to your uh various options.

A

You have in your business logic. So that's the way how you would check for reminders and then send the reminder if the approval is not done. This is a lot to consume, don't worry about it. We are prepping a template uh for this to be available in power automate website, so that you can actually uh get this uh by clicking uh just a template rather than rebuilding this. um I have a link as well that I will share in the chat download.

A

So that's that's the logic for sending the reminders but but hold on look what happens when an approval is sent and how does this get processed right? So I'm using the create an approval action which basically allows you to create an approval, but don't send it right. It waits for you to send the approval before initiating that approval process.

A

It allows you to do something between that time period, so I create an approval which is no different to how you have today and then I am setting the approval uh link that I get uh in the in the reminder: email that you that you saw that opened up the approval portal to approve or reject the the approval request. So I'm capturing that so that I can use later uh in my emails and then I am initiating the approval process.

A

So now I am initiating the approval process in the sense that the approval will be sent to the users, the approvers, and we will have to wait and at this point in time I'm going to say approval done is true, because once it comes out of the wait state and then comes to this stage, the approval is done. So now we can set the approval done variable to true which then, when this parallel branch, you know goes through its cycle where it's uh delayed for a minute and then gets back.

A

uh You know after sleep after the delay, it will check for the variable and it would be true and it will stop the approval process- approval reminders that it sends to the approvers. So once I have done the approval here, I have all the information. I have the data that who the approvers are, and I also have the data around what comments they left right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to enumerate those and build a table.

A

So basically, I use a select option that lets me select a particular values from an array. So all of the approval system is an array. The responses, because I have you know more than one approval. I have more than one response and there's like everything that happens between them. So what I'm doing is I'm selecting the response of collection from the approval and then I'm getting out the approver the comments and the rest box right. So that's how I'm building uh these uh particular things. Now you can see here. I actually don't need this.

A

I have the expression uh that basically says if there are no comments type in no comments right, if you have, if comments are not empty, then take the item, comment, property and then uh show it up there. So if you have just someone, you know, don't submit any comments. This would say no comment really putting the business logic there to make this really pretty right and that's the stuff is I just get it from the responses collection where I can get who the approver is and what their uh response is, whether it's approved or rejected.

A

Once I have that I can create an html table uh that that basically takes the output of the select, which is a you know, a json uh array again and then converts into an html table. But this html table is not really pretty uh it's really.

A

uh You know it doesn't have any borders or tables, and things like that, but you can just go to any site that allows you to build html tables and then put the style here, and uh you know the css styling and and then you put the output of the html table that you are using uh here in the uh in this action.

A

So that's how um you can you can basically like style, the html table you get into the whatever border and colors, and things like that that you want and- and this basically uh looked like this right, so it basically built me the stable, with these blue borders around and a header with a gray background that helped me to easily build this table.

A

And finally, what I'm going to do is check if my outcome is approved or rejected and based on that, I basically send the email back to the approvers of the requester that hey your request was approved. Your request was objective right, so that's the flow that I built that allows you to uh create an approval, send the approval, but also have a branch that can check whether, if the approval was done and then send reminders.

A

So obviously here I can't really uh understand whether um vesa has done and just send a reply, just a reminder to wesson right, because today I can only say whether an approval is done or not. I can't say if charts has responded to the approval of wesa has responded to the approval, for that you would have to use the workaround, which is create two approval branches.

A

You know or n number of approval branches, depending on the number of approvers you have, which is very complicated, but this is again one of the capabilities that we want to build in the power automate connector. To really give the uh you know, understanding of um you know who have completed the approval and who haven't responded to the approval, so that gives really even more logic here in the reminder approval. So you don't spam every approver, even though they have responded, but just only concentrate and focus on the folks that haven't responded.

A

So those are all the improvements that we know we have to do, but um this is you know a year ago or six months ago, this was like really hard like. We only had star and weight approval and setting these variables and doing all this was like even building html table was really like cumbersome, uh but we have come a long way to make these things simpler and approachable for users, especially power users, to go build these uh flows in power automate. um So that's my demo. I hope this was useful.

A

um There are some bugs, but if folks want to get their hands on on these on this flow and and use it and customize it for your business logic, I will share the link so that uh you can download and import it in your power automatic tenant and and try to customize it for your needs.

B

Excellent excellent, thank you, chucks good way of engaging also, at least with a with the the host of the call so but really cool stuff.