How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Jordan26
Tera Expert

I am trying to create a flow which will perform sequential approvals for a record, but it doesn't seem like Flow Designer supports this.

The scenario is a given record has 3 different people that need to approve, but sequentially. This means that Approval A should trigger first, and once that person approves, then Approval B should occur, then Approval C. Then only once all three have approved should the approval field on the record be marked as approved, but if any of them reject along the way the flow should stop and the approval on the record be marked rejected.

The behavior I am seeing when setting this up is that if you set up each approval activity to approve or reject, when the first approval is done, the record is approved then when the next approval is generated, the approval is set back to requested and this continues until the final approval leaves the approval as approved. I tried setting the first two approvals to only Reject if anyone rejects, but what happens when they're configured that way is the first approval is approved which leaves the approval field as requested but when the next approval in the sequence is generated, the approval field is changed back to Not Yet Requested and then immediately back to requested. 

What I am looking to do is to have the first two approvals set the approval field to rejected if they are rejected, but if they are approved to simply leave the approval field as requested until the last approval is completed and then set the approval field value to either rejected or approved based on the outcome of that last approval.

 

If anyone has any insight on how to configure a flow this way it would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Unfortunately I haven't, the best I could do is to chain Ask for Approval actions where all but the last approval in the chain has it's approval rule set to reject when anyone rejects and the last approval is set to approve or reject when anyone rejects.

 

This still causes the Approval field to jump back and forth between Not Yet Requested and Requested but at the end of the day it works to create the approval chain. Just be careful that you don't have any logic running on the Approval field that is triggered when the value changes to Requested, otherwise that will trigger for each new approval that is generated.

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24 REPLIES 24

sachin_namjoshi
Kilo Patron
Kilo Patron

This is due to the approval engine set to "Approval Rules." Change it to "Turn engines off" to fix the issue.

 

 

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Regards,

Sachin

Sachin, thank you for the reply, unfortunately this isn't the issue as the tables the approvals are for are custom tables that have not been extended from task.

Thanks Sachin. This worked for me. I was trying for Req item table

Thank you Sachin, it worked for me when I turned off approval engines for Requested Item.