question Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer? in ServiceNow AI Platform forum

How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Jordan26 — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:11:31 GMT

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!

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

sachin_namjoshi — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:59:33 GMT

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

Regards,

Sachin

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Jordan26 — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 16:26:01 GMT

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.

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Antonio39 — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 11:45:27 GMT

In "ask for approval" action you can configure the way you want your approval goes:

in your case i would do something like that:

putting some users or groups, but then it depends the way you select the approvers/approval groups.

Keep in touch

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Kyle Brown — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 15:57:59 GMT

Hey Jordan,

Did you get a solution to this one? It seems like a pretty standard use case for lots of people and it's these kinds of things that have made me hold off on moving away from old-fashioned workflows so far.

Regards,

Kyle

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

markcorl — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 04:07:05 GMT

Hi Jordan,

You will need to use some nested IF and ELSE IF logic after each approval to check for a previous approval or rejection. I will explain each situation below and include a screen shot of a flow I'm currently using.

Approver Rejects:
If the initial approver rejects, the first 'IF Rejected' validation returns TRUE and takes a path that contains an update to the rejected record and then ends the flow. In my example, the record is an RITM record where I'm setting the 'Approval' field to Rejected and the 'State' field to Closed Complete and lastly ending the flow.

Approver Approves:
If the initial approver approves, the first 'IF Rejected' validation returns FALSE and proceeds to the first 'ELSE IF Approved' validation, which will return TRUE. Beneath the 'ELSE IF' action is where you will add your 2nd 'Ask for Approval' action. Now repeat the process until you've stepped through all your tiered approvals. The last 'Ask for Approval' action will only need to check for Rejection. If the final validation results in an approval, the flow will bounce back to whatever action is next in your flow.

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

arizeciri — Wed, 05 May 2021 11:18:42 GMT

Hi Jordan.

I have the same Problem.

Have you been able to find a solution for this?

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Damien15 — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 01:10:12 GMT

Hi,

I had the similar problem, and was able to address it using a sub-flow for the approvals. Based on checking a sub-flow had a wait option, wherein the approval won't proceed to the next activity until the sub-flow was completed.

Sample Sub-flow:

and this is the structure of our flow for reference:

Hope this can help. Have a great day!

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Jon11 — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 21:36:53 GMT

I tried this, and what kept happening for me is:

If the first approval is APPROVED, the second approval was sent to the group of users as expected, but the first approval was reset back to "requesting approval". The first user can approve again and bypass the second tier of approvals. Looks like this after the first approval was already approved:

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Mary T — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 22:44:20 GMT

The solution proposed here did not help me either. The Approval field keeps switching from Approved to Requested when a new approval is requested... instead of the field getting updated when there are no more approvals (or when 1 is rejected)

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Community Alums — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 11:49:32 GMT

Hi,

I have a similar requirement.

Was anyone able to overcome this issue. Please share if any idea on how to overcome this.

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Antonio39 — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 09:36:38 GMT

hi,

can you provide more informations about your issue?

thx

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Tristan Elmore — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 17:26:03 GMT

After a painful amount of trying to test a Flow I created on a Catalog Item / Request record generated from a Catalog item with several sequential approvals, I believe I stumbled across a workaround where you don't have to Turn Engines off under Approval Rules.

We're trying to convert most of our Workflows on Catalog Items to Flows, and I built out and tested my new Flow while the old Workflow was still applied to the Catalog Item. When I went to run the Flow by itself without the Workflow, all of a sudden the Approvals are all wonky. As others described, when you hit your next Approval in your Workflow all of a sudden your previous Approvals are Requested again, which is NOT what we want.

Basically, what our Service Management / SN Administrator team explained to me was:

The Approval engine is only used when the Request Item has a Delivery Plan associated with it. If the Request Item is being managed by a Workflow, then the approval engines are automatically turned off.

So all you need to do is have a Workflow be running simultaneously to the Flow and have the same trigger / begin and end conditions for both. All you need is to have your Workflow stall while you're flow is running and then have the End conditions align on both your Flow and Workflow. In most cases from an IT Support (and arguably ITSM) perspective, at least for our organization, a Closed Request or Incident is the end game.

This is relatively straight forward to set up on Catalog Items if you populate both fields.

This is a great alternative to switching off something Global like Approval Rules and potentially breaking a bunch of other things in your instance that may rely on those (at least from what I understand, don't quote me on that). You also don't have to have full-on admin rights in a developer instance to utilize this workaround--as long as you have access to Flows and Workflows.

I'm not a Developer, nor do I have extensive coding experience but I do a lot of work in our development environment to leverage OOB features to fulfill things so we don't have to custom build everything. I look at a lot of code and sometimes modify it, but I don't really create it (yet). We've found that way things tend to break down less over time.

Hope this helps someone!

Tristan

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

parth2 — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 05:16:55 GMT

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

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Shawn McCormick — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 19:07:44 GMT

Unfortunately it seems that we are no longer permitted to associate both a flow and a workflow to a Catalog Item?

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Mi Mi — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 21:41:17 GMT

Thank you so much, @markcorl. It is really helpful to me to solve my issue.

Regards

mmk

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Rajini2 — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 20:29:24 GMT

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

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

arizeciri — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 15:02:39 GMT

Have you been able to fix the challenge?

I have the same issue here on the request table.

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

Jordan26 — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 15:27:09 GMT

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.

Re: How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

-O- — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 15:29:26 GMT

You should open a new thread for this. You are not the original poster, therefore you cannot accept something as an answer, therefore point-hunters cannot benefit (rack up points) from answering your problem, therefore most probably nobody will.

Plus saying "I have the same issue" in response to an answer that does not describe solutions is in no way indicative of what is your problem. How could anyone help you without knowing where you need help?