Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hi,

I have two Power Automate flows and I’m struggling with how to correctly track approval status across flows.

Flow 1 – Monthly flow

•Trigger: Scheduled (monthly)

•Creates Standard approval (First response)

•Does not wait for approval

•Stores ApprovalId = outputs('Create_approval')?['body/name'] in SharePoint

•Sets status to “Waiting internal action”

This flow must always finish, even if the approval is never answered.

Flow 2 – Polling flow

•Trigger: Scheduled (every 15 minutes)

•Gets SharePoint items where:

•Status = “Waiting internal action”

•ApprovalId is not empty

•For each item:

•Check approval outcome

•Approved → update SharePoint

•Rejected → notify via Teams

•No response after X days → send reminder

Problem

•Wait for an approval is not usable (blocking / validation errors)

•Get approval details causes 400 Bad Request and the flow cannot be saved

•Error happens at design time, not runtime

ApprovalId is valid, stored as text, and not empty.

Question

1.Is this two-flow pattern supported?

2.What is the correct way to read approval outcome from another flow?

3.Is there a known limitation with approvals + dynamic IDs?

4.What is the recommended non-blocking approval architecture?

Thanks!

Categories:

General topics

You don't need a flow that polls every 15 minutes. Instead, you can set it up like this:

Store the approval ID with the item like you are doing. That is needed.
When the approval is created, update the source field in the approval just created with a unique value to your workflows. I set it to the workflow ID that creates the approval. This establishes the relationship between the list item and the workflow that will process the approval once it has been completed.
Then create a workflow that triggers when a row is added, modified or deleted in Dataverse. Configure it with these settings:
1. Changed type: Modified
2. Table name: Approvals
3. Scop: Organization
4. Select Columns: statuscode
5. Filter rows: msdyn_flow_approval_source eq 'unique GUID of flow that created approval' and statuscode eq 192350004, which means the approval has been completed.
6. Then add a List rows action to the flow to retrieve the outcome of the approval. Configure it with these settings:
  1. Table name: Approval Responses
  2. Filter rows: msdyn_flow_approvalresponseidx_approvalid eq '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/msdyn_flow_approvalid']}'
7. You can then get your related item in SharePoint with a Get items action based on the stored approval ID:
8. You will probably want to check to make sure 1 item is returned. Since this will essentially allow an unlimited amount of time to elapse between when the approval was sent and when the outcome is received, someone could have deleted the original SharePoint request. Checking to make sure that it returns one item allows you to do some error handling.