Group Approvals in Flow Designer missing 'an approval from each group' option?

[mcorl]

Hey gang!

TL;DR - Flow Designer does not appear to have functionality to accept a single approver from each group. It's either every approver from every group or a single approver from any group.

Customer requirements are typically satisfied by a single approval from each group when it comes to group approvals in a workflow. If they have four approval groups, it's typically not desirable for only a single approval to come from a single group. A single rejection from any group is a different story, but at least one approval from each group is the most common requirement I see. Now, everybody's favorite classic workflow editor had no problem dealing with this requirement and has a couple options. One was 'An approval from each group' and 'First response from each group'.

Flow Designer appears to be devoid of such options. In the lone 'Ask for Approval' action, there is indeed a setting to determine "when" to Approve. Let's take a look at those options:

Anyone approves = A single approval from any number of approvers is all that is needed to satisfy this approval.
All users approve = Every single standalone approver and group member needs to approve to satisfy this approval.
% of users approve = A provided percentage of user approvals is needed to satisfy this approval.
# of user approve = A provided number of user approvals is needed to satisfy this approval.

Clearly, none of the above options allow a single user from each group to approve and satisfy the approval.

The one option I did NOT mention above is All responded and anyone approves. This would appear to be the closest choice for what I'm looking for and tends to make one believe it satisfies the approval by translating to 'At least one person from each group needs to respond and approve before we're good'. Unfortunately, it does not work that way.

In the screenshot below, you can see my configuration.

1. I am pulling in multiple users from a table and requiring ALL of them to approve, which works fine.
2. I am requiring ALL manual approvers to approve, which works fine.
3. I am pulling in multiple groups (that contain 2 or more users each) and asking for a response from all groups with anyone approving, which does NOT work. It waits for all the other approvals, including every group member to approve before considering the Approval action 'approved'.
1. I would expect this to set the remaining group members to No Longer Required after the 1st approval for that group was submitted. That doesn't happen.
2. That does happen when I set it to Anyone approves. Then once a member from ANY group approves, it sets ALL groups to approved and ALL other members from ALL groups to No Longer Required.

I was considering opening a support ticket for this, but was hesitant since there doesn't appear to be another person in the entire ServiceNow ecosystem who has asked this question (or at least none I could find). Typically when I can't find anyone else having my issue, it means I'm overlooking something or unaware of some type of functionality. I find it hard to believe no one else has seen this and that I'm the first person to ask, but I guess it's possible. It's also possible this is a bug in Flow Designer and I will need to submit a support ticket.

Regardless, I apologize for the verbose post and look forward to your feedback!! 

[Jose Manuel]

It's kind the same. we only need to change the sintaxys. here is an example:

Rejects1#G[sys_id_group_1]&1#G[sys_id_group_2]

In this case, you only need to change the word "Approves" by "Rejects".

Let me know if this worked.

[Kieran Jones1]

After spending hours going over the forums, I found your reply here and tried it but it still didn't work in my instance.

But, I then stumbled upon this article: https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB1561381

Once I set the system property 'com.glide.hub.flow.approval.function.early_terminate' to true, the issue is completely resolved and it works.

I'm curious to know if you have this property set to true in your instance.

[Owen]

I too have just spent hours looking over the forums and trawling through the debugger to see if I could work out why Flow Designer group approvals didn't behave like Workflow group approvals, as we've recently started using Flows for some approvals.

I would have never found that KB, so thanks for posting this.

[Jose Manuel]

I didn't review it in the moment, but right now, in my yokomaha's instance, I don't have that property and it works. maybe it was solved.

Great to hear you could solve it !

[georgematau]

This can be done using FlowDesigner approval rules in both drag-and-drop and scripted format

Drag and drop should look something like this. The two groups have to be added separately with AND between them translating to 'Anyone from each group'. If the groups are added instead in the same box, then this would translate to ''Anyone from all groups'.

Using scripted approvals the code should be like this 

AnyG['group1_sysid']&AnyG['group2_sysid']

In older instances I found out that this doesn't work until I set the system property 'com.glide.hub.flow.approval.function.early_terminate' to false, as suggested by this article from NowSupport https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB1504056