How to Trigger an Approval from a Business Process Flow (Power Automate Tutorial)

[@dschaurich]

Valeu!

[@LisaCrosbie]

Thank you so much, really appreciate that.

[@ranjanroy1623]

This is the best place to learn MDA , thanks Lisa 1 Q, the "request approval" which is above "RUn FLow " always show as Processing , how to get rid of it !

[@ZamboniElite]

I also would like to know how to update this. I have seen in other videos that you can use Power Automate to change the status but I cannot find the table/entity that houses the "Processing" status.

[@coolbeing163]

thx Lisa. I liked your idea of showing output first and then makes user know "How to" built it instead of letting user visualize it. 👍

[@LisaCrosbie]

Awesome, thanks for that feedback.

[@IftikharAhmad-qo7jd]

Another great video , keep up with your great work

[@LisaCrosbie]

Thanks, will do!

[@tristangeoffroy9286]

Hi Lisa, once more I used your tutorial, very good thank you.

[@LisaCrosbie]

Glad it was helpful, thank you.

[@andrewsheehy6163]

These videos are great! Wish I had found them before I started out. Would have saved me a lot of rework. One thing that still causes me problems is giving access to my Environments and testing access. Would appreciate something that shows how to make an intake form available to the organization (in a separate environment than Production) and then how to give others more privileges.

[@LisaCrosbie]

Thanks so much Andrew, and thanks for the suggestion. I do have on my list to make some videos about environments, security, Dataverse permissions, will get to it!

[@AudrieGordon]

Thanks so much for this amazing video Lisa! I mentioned both of your videos in Day 17 of the DV Advent Calendar on BPFs. You're deeply appreciated for all the wonderful videos you share, and happy holidays!

[@LisaCrosbie]

Loving the advent calendar, thank you for the shout out and for all your support, love your work, looking forward to that collab we must do next year!

[@AudrieGordon]

@@LisaCrosbie YES! Can't wait! Happy Holidays!

[@HeroTimeManufacturing]

Another amazing video, thank you.

[@LisaCrosbie]

Glad you enjoyed it, and thank you.;

[@tranauchocolat]

Great video Lisa. I wonder if you could do a follow up video on this on dynamic approval to get managers approval?

[@normanmann7404]

Hi Lisa ! I‘m interested how stage gating is solved. Any idea when the “next video” will be released ?

[@LisaCrosbie]

It's up next, have had a massive workload the last couple of weeks so I'm a bit behind. Coming soon, stay tuned. Thank you :-)

[@MichelleDemont]

Good afternoon Lisa, Thank you for all your helpful KZbin Videos. I have a question, I have completed the triggering of an approval from a business process flow with the implementation into teams , However, If say for example the flow is not rejected due to information that is incorrect, how can I send the flow back to the user to fix / change the request which they are requesting the approval for? For example, an employee submits an approval to a manager to approve a new client. The client details do not match the corresponding documentation, so the manager therefore submits the rejection back to the employee and requests for the information to be correctly noted. Once that has been rectified, the employee submits the information back to the manager for final review and approval. I have looked on your KZbin but unfortunately you do not have anything which addresses this? Your help would be greatly appreciated.

[@ronniecoleby]

Amazing this has demystified so much for me - so happy! Is there a way that you can prompt a user to save the record in the initial step?

[@maitreyipaul]

Hello Lisa .. I really liked your video ..the content is clear and easy to follow. Here what I am not sure about is how to get the to the first stage of approval ? Will be kind enough to explain ?

[@HariyDrumroll]

If there's multiple approvers I think you need to check for the approval 'Outcome' which then doesn't create a For Each loop - you don't necessarily want the original record updated after each approver actions their approval. Thanks for these videos, I would be lost without them!

[@LisaCrosbie]

Absolutely if you were using multiple approved you’d need a different approach- perhaps a future video! Thanks.

[@YoRAHeem]

Wouldn’t that be a pending final approval by?

[@jay1970]

First of all great explanation. A question, if I have to store approvers' decision, comments, decision date in a custom table to show on model driven app...is it possible? So app will show approval history along with details such as decision (approved/rejected), date action was taken, and any comments. This can be useful with multi step approvals.

[@juansepowerplatform]

Thank you for the video, best channel for model driven apps. My issue with business process flows is how to hide all the inputs in the form so that users can only enter what's on the flow without using the controls in the form... regards

[@popgugu]

Unless I misunderstood what you want to achieve. All you have to do is to not put those fields on the form. If somehow you need to have those fields on the form, you may use business rules for whatever condition you want to hide those fields.

[@LisaCrosbie]

Correct Sompop, thanks.

[@munkybutler1]

Hi Lisa, thanks for another great video. I see the Flow Step is still in preview over a year later. Do you know when this is going to be made GA? I am guessing that Microsoft are also working away in the background to modernise the whole Business Process Flow studio.

[@LisaCrosbie]

You're right, there hasn't been an update on this in a long time and I haven't seen anything. I'm with you in hoping there will be a real overhaul to modernise this at some stage, stay tuned, if/when that happens I will certainly make videos about it!

[@eyalgrn30]

Is it possible to send an approval to email rather than teams and have the approver click on the email to approve?

[@LisaCrosbie]

Yes, you can add email steps to the flow - there's a template here that should help you get it set up: powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/details/cc5fd5ef4406440a89e2a8ecf5d3f92e/send-approval-and-follow-up-via-email/

[@eyalgrn30]

@@LisaCrosbie Thanks!!! and btw - your videos on Power apps are wonderful!!

[@mohammedmerchant5628]

Hi Lisa, this was amazing, very clear and easy to follow. I'd like to know how you'd dynamically pull the Equipment Order number in the cloud flow approval action so that when the email comes in, it also shows what Equipment order number you're approving. I know the deep link takes you to it, but it's not readily available in the email subject. Thanks

[@mohammedmerchant5628]

I think I stumbled upon it. I inserted an action Get Row By ID before the approval action and gave it the same ID as the BPF stage name ID, and it gave an output with the equipment name, & all other fields from equipment order table. Now I can use that in the dynamic content of the approval action to make it's title more meaningful.

[@LisaCrosbie]

Well done, you’ve solved it. Once your flow has access to the right table you can dynamically pull any field into your email.

[@christianmelkane4446]

Hi Lisa, Thanks for the great videos. Can you please show us how we can add a dynamic individual person in approval's "assigned to"field?

[@LisaCrosbie]

Indeed I can, great suggestion, thanks, I've added it to the list.

[@Slank32]

Great video! The most helpful BPF video for me so far! The only issue I am having is being able to SEE the flows I've created to use for my flow steps. I created a Dataverse Cloud Flow using the "When a flow step is executed" trigger but cannot see it. Could it have something to do with the configuration of the environment?

[@LisaCrosbie]

You need to have that flow inside your solution, then you'll be able to find it.

[@MathieuLaflamme]

Would be great to have a part 2 for advance developers: 1) Should trigger the approval automatically when the business process step is reached 2) Should go to next step in the business process automatically. 3) The approver should not be hardcoded and taken from somewhere in the Dataverse. 4) What if there are multiple approver level? 5) What if the approval request times out?

[@LisaCrosbie]

thanks for the suggestion - some of that requires code, which is not my area, I've got more than enough to cover with the low code capabilities. You might like to look at Elaiza Benitez's channel, she's done more on that kind of thing.

[@larrygleaner1683]

Thanks again Lisa! Your videos have been a life saver for me. Do you cover custom workflows in any of your other videos? For example, if an amount is under $1000, we need to send to one approver. But if the amount is over $1000, it goes to another?

[@LisaCrosbie]

I have not done a video like that but I will, thank you for the suggestion, that's a great use case.

[@larrygleaner1683]

@@LisaCrosbie thanks, you rock!

[@joelshepherd6933]

Hey Lisa, any video on how to build a e-commerce app on power portal please,

[@LisaCrosbie]

Hi Joel, I wouldn’t be using portals for that there would be a lot of building stuff and integration with a payment gateway etc. The e-commerce offering in the Microsoft stack is Dynamics 365 Commerce but to be honest there are a lot of other e-commerce products on the market that are an easier starting point depending on your use case. Eg shopify.

[@joelshepherd6933]

@@LisaCrosbie it will be internal organisational app where no payment is required. Is there a possibility?

[@munkybutler1]

Hi Lisa, another quick one. Is there any way to grey out the 'Run Flow' button in the Business Process Flow based on what other columns contain? Thanks!!

[@kordesachin]

Hi Lisa, I am revisiting a completed case and want to edit few fields and seek an approval again. To edit data and seek a reapproval , I am reactivating case. Is there any way where I can get a hold on the case status or whether user clicked on reactivate option?

[@madhanlakshmanan5113]

And why the request approval was always in the processing state?It will update any state?It confusing the user which approval in always processing mode!

[@duorenmi]

hi, Lisa, what license will be required in order to create Business Process Flow (BPF) and can send an email notification?

[@LisaCrosbie]

Business Process Flows come with the Power Apps Premium license.

[@coolbeing163]

Hi Lisa, In Business rules, we need to deactivate the rule and then update our changes and re-activate. Howerver, this is not the case in BPF @ 14:20,. We can update it without deactivating>update>activating. Any idea why this discrimination?

[@LisaCrosbie]

They are two completely different parts of the functionality, even though they have similar build screens - and both these build screen experiences are from the legacy experience - they've been around forever and don't match the modern maker experience. Hoping for more consistency in future, I agree this is confusing.

[@sudhiracharya3102]

How can we define security roles for these approvals if multiple users are involved and they need to update some fields and approve/reject? is this controlled by security roles/column security/form security or through something else?

[@yokeshm5861]

Hi lisa how to find out the ROWID or GUID?

[@LisaCrosbie]

To find the guid for a particular record, navigate to it and then you’ll find it at the end of the URL

[@orbitblox6977]

Hey QQ, The flow oce run here will be always showing Processing is there way not show the message after approved or rejected

[@LisaCrosbie]

Yeah unfortunately this feature has been in preview for a very long time and hasn't had the attention it needs to make it better.

[@PowerBA-BusinessAnalyst]

Can we send this approval request to the person who is in different tenant or don’t have Dynamics Access?

[@LisaCrosbie]

Hi Mubarik, you can definitely send it to users in your tenant who don't have Dynamics access (although the part I show here where they click through to view it in Dynamics wouldn't be available to those users, so you'd want to pass more information about the approval through to the approval card itself.). You can't send it to people outside your tenant although it does support guest users in your AzureAD - more details here docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/April19/microsoft-flow/support-guest-users-approvals?WT.mc_id=BA-MVP-5003537

[@larrygleaner1683]

Hey Lisa, me again. One issue we are having now is that the method of hard coding part of the URL for the item link doesn't work properly once we import our solution to our production environment. Any advice on making the whole link dynamic?

[@ajzafar4403]

try to use an environment variable for the first part of the url

[@hawawa8845]

how to make that orange progress status bar just like this video showing？

[@LisaCrosbie]

You'll find the full beginner tutorial of how to create that (it's called a Business Process Flow) here kzbin.info/www/bejne/navbnnasi7l6g9E