How to perform sequential approvals in Flow Designer?

[Jordan26]

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!

[Tristan Elmore]

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

[Shawn McCormick]

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

[Jordan26]

Super late in getting to this but while this may work, it's 100% a workaround and not a solution to the problem. I would have hoped that after this much time has passed from when I originally made this post that ServiceNow would have found a way to allow approval chains in flows without having the Approval field constantly move from Not Yet Requested to Requested then back to Not Yet Requested every time an approval is generated and either rejected or approved but sadly this isn't the case.

The best option here is just to chain Ask for Approval actions and have all but the last action in the chain have its approval rule set to Reject and the last in the chain set to Approve or Reject. This still causes the flip-flopping between Not Yet Requested and Requested in the Approval field on the task being approved but will function to generate chains of approvals.

[arizeciri]

Have you been able to fix the challenge? 

I have the same issue here on the request table.

[Jordan26 · 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.