Flow Designer: Ask for Approval in Foreach loop

[kim-lindgren]

I have a form where the user can select multiple products, and for each product I want to Ask for Approval and then continue the flow to trigger more Ask for Approval actions for other products as well.

The problem is, such a loop doesn't seem to work because the Ask for Approval action has an in-built 'Wait' functionality and there is no obvious way you can turn it off. The issue was discussed in a Reddit thread two years ago and they did not find a solution:

https://www.reddit.com/r/servicenow/comments/s3xypy/flow_designer_ask_for_approval_in_foreach_loop/

So is this just not possible with Flow Designer? Any suggested solutions or workarounds would be much appreciated!

Basically, I just wish there was a simple "Wait" checkbox on the Ask for Approval action, and that you could turn it off if you wanted to, similar to how things work on the action Create Catalog Task.

/Kim

[Hemanth M1]

Hi @kim-lindgren ,

Do you wana configure approvals sequential or Parallel??

if its parallel (don't want to wait )you can use do the following in parallel as blow:

[kim-lindgren]

No, Do in Parallell doesn't work because I have over 12 products that must be iterated over, besides more products may be added in the future and then you would have to change the flow every time (and shortly you would end up with more than 50 actions in the flow).

[SenaiT]

Hi @kim-lindgren, where you able to solve this problem? I am facing with similar issue. I have approvals requirement inside foreach and would like the approvals notifications sent out for each iteration instead of waiting until the foreach loop to complete and then send one general approval.

[kim-lindgren]

Some time ago I did this so I don't totally remember, I think I used an Ask for Approval action with Wait functionality and unchecked the Wait condition, but that creates its own problem: Each approver will be added to the approvers' list at the same time, which means they will all count as one group of approvers. So if you have the condition "Approve when anyone approves", that means only one of the approvers in the list now has to approve the item.

Something I have learnt is that ServiceNow has preferences for how to do things and it's best to work with them whenever possible. Try to split up your item so that it becomes several different RITM's if possible, for instance using an order guide, then you can have several approval flows running in parallell and completely independent from each other.

/Kim