Flow Designer stage issue with catalog item

[Community Alums]

A recent request came in for a catalog item and I decided to give Flow Designer a go rather than using Workflow Editor. I am seeing different behavior with Flow Designer so I created 2 very simple tests to illustrate the issue. 

Workflow Editor

Super simple catalog item that will immediately ask for an approval. Note I set the Stage to "Waiting for Approval". The result is that the RITM stage is set to "Waiting for Approval" and in the history of RITM I see only 1 entry for stage. 

Flow Designer

This is the exact same setup, just a simple approval request and I am setting the stage upfront to "Waiting for Approval". The difference is that when submitting the catalog item, the stage starts out as Waiting for Approval, then gets transitioned to Request Approved and then finally gets set to Waiting for Approval. 

Not only does this look odd in the Audit log because it looks as though I approved the request and then Flow Designer flips it back to Waiting for Approval. 

Is this expected behavior? I am not configuring flow designer properly? Part of me thinks it a bug because the REQ related to the RITM has the stage set as Request Approved and with workflow editor it will set the RITM to Request Approved if you don't set the stage on the activity to Waiting for Approval. From what I read that is intended behavior but perhaps SN didn't implement that with Flow Designer? https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0793190

[SebastianKunzke]

Hey,

In my understanding this is an expected behavior, because the approval of a request and an approval within a requested item can be differently, because of that you may need the same stage twice. However the "Request Approved" stage within a request is mandatory to start the requested item flow.

Small use case: Catalog Item to request permissions to ServiceNow HR.

The request will need an approval by the manager of the user, because the license will be charged to the user. Within the fullfilment of the requested item the product manager of ServiceNow HR has approve, if the user is allowed to access his module. In this step you may need both steps and would like to display that as stages. However the flow designer give you the possibility to create a custom stages. I would advice to create a stage "Waiting for HR approval" instead of "Waiting for Approval", if the second approval stage is needed.

I hope that helps.

[Community Alums]

Yeah SN said this was expected. Perhaps the older workflow model just didn't take this into account. Thanks