Skipped due to no valid approvers encoutered while building custom app

[Jeffrey Barton]

I'm using the wonderful app engine studio and flow designer to build out an app for my company.  I created an approval field called CRCS approval with type choice and give it the choice type and setup the choices the same as on other approvals but when I use it as the "approval" field on flow designer it's giving me the error "Skipped due to no valid approvers" which I can't figure out.  The user that is the approver has the approval user role and is the manager of the user in question.  So I figure it has to do with the way I configured the field. 
Next test was to change the field type to string and use choices on the string like it does on the sc_request approval field.  That's also not working.  Same issue.  I can't get it to trigger/create an approval record on the approval table - it only skips.  What I can't figure out is how the "reference" fields work on that approval field so I can duplicate the functionality.  Is there a field type I should have picked or some quirky thing about custom tables I'm not aware of that's causing this?  Please help.

[Dr Atul G- LNG · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jeffrey Barton 

https://www.servicenow.com/community/developer-forum/approvals-are-being-skipped-in-my-flow-designer...

https://www.servicenow.com/community/developer-forum/approval-skipped-will-equal-an-error-in-the-flo...

[Jeffrey Barton]

neither of those seem to apply.  but I'll ask - am I required to use flow stages in a custom app?

This is coming from a record producer catalog item to create the record then the flow triggers when the record is created.
I'm wondering if it has to do with not having a requested for or something like that.
I created a field to hold the "created by" from the sys_created_by because sys one won't let you click it in flow designer to grab the manager.  Here's a screenshot of the flow.

[DrewW]

Whatever value is in the choice/string or any other type of field it needs to be a sys_id of either a group or user.

So for a choice field the values need to be the sys_id of the user/group and the label can be whatever you like.

[Jeffrey Barton]

I was able to get the app to run an approval but I can't get a trigger to send an email built because it seems like the sysapproval_approval document_id won't like to a custom app.