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

[Jesper Slot]

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:

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

[Jesper Slot · 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.

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

[Maik Skoddow]

Thanks for the solution. Something learned again 🙂

[Sridevi 79]

Hi,

May I know what exact condition you have mention in Else If because I have similar kind of the requirement to add approvals manually from variable.

[Jesper Slot]

Hi Sridevi, 

This is a flow for a homegrown application. In this application we support three types of approval: Manually, automatic (from some predefined list) and no approval. This is something that is predefined per request coming in, so the flow checks what kind of approval method that has to be used with this request type. In this case it's manual approval, meaning the agents will add approvers.  

Kr

Jesper

[Joel O]

Hi Jesper, 

By chance do you have that UI Action handy that I can take a look at? I'm working on a similar situation and am new to scripting, I'm looking to just understand how it works.