Ask for Approval in flow designer - How is manual approval intended to work?

Jesper Slot
Tera Guru

Hi, 

We're running Paris, I'm building a scoped application, based on the task table, with a flow for the "lifecycle" of the requests.

We need several options for approval. It could be line manager or a list/group of predefined users, which is quite simple to set up in Flow Designer.

However for some requests we would also need the supporter to investigate before applying the approver, so in that scenario I would like to use the Ask for Approval with manual approvers option. I just can't see how this was intended to be used... which is where I call for your help.

I've been googling and searching the ServiceNow documentation, but haven't been able to see any examples or just a description of how this is intended to work.

So far I've set up the Ask for Approval action like this:

find_real_file.png

And normally, with the line manager or group of approvers, I'd follow up with a Wait for condition action on the approval state. But in this case, this do not work. 

Any knowledge on how to follow up on the Ask for Approval with manual approval? 

 

KR
Jesper S. Grumsen

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Having the approvers added to the record before coming to this Ask For Approval action in the flow worked very well - even with multiple approves added.

So here is a snip of my workflow:

- In step 30 I update the "Work Note" telling the support agent that this specific request requires approvers to be added manually and that they should follow up by setting the State to "Pending Approval". I build a UI Action for changing the state.

- In step 31 I put in a "Wait For Condition" action that waits for the state to become "Pending Approval". 

- This is then followed up by an "Ask For Approval" action in step 32. 

When the state is changed to pending approval, the Ask For Approval action grabs the related approval records, changes their state from "Not Yet Requested" to "Requested". When approved, the Approval field on the record is changed to approved.

   

find_real_file.png

 

 

Well, simple enough... when you know the process 😉

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12 REPLIES 12

Ankur Bawiskar
Tera Patron
Tera Patron

Hi,

if you are using Ask for Approval in Flow designer you need to specify the users or groups.

There is no option for manual approval

Regards
Ankur

Regards,
Ankur
Certified Technical Architect  ||  9x ServiceNow MVP  ||  ServiceNow Community Leader

But you can see the option in my screenshot?

Maik Skoddow
Tera Patron
Tera Patron

Hi @Jesper S. Grumsen 

there is some documentation even with an example at https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/paris-servicenow-platform/page/administer/flow-designer/reference...

And for case you could either use OR conditions at "Rules" line:

find_real_file.png

or you put an if-query in front of it:

find_real_file.png

But I would try to prevent the last case because you also have to handle the approval state after "Ask for approval" which would lead to redundant logic.

Kind regards
Maik

If my answer replied your question please mark appropriate response as correct so that the question will appear as resolved for other users who may have a similar question in the future.

Hi Maik, 

Thanks for taking time to look into this and for your answer. And for your link! However, I know the page, it's speciflcly the Manual Approval I'm missing examples on.

After the Ask for Approval action on "Manual User(s)" I would expect that the user should add an approver to on the record and once that gets approved, I cannot get the flow to detect that the approval records has been approved/rejected.

I only now realize that perhabs the approval record should already be there, related to the record, before getting to this step in the flow? Must admit that I havent tested this. I'll try... but yeah, thats why I'm missing examples on how ServiceNow thought this process (with manual approval) should work. 

Kr
Jesper