Reminder Emails for approvals that are inside an apply to each loop

[WBADAM03]

Hey all,

I have a complex flow that I am in the process of making more user friendly. Below is a specific snippet from this flow

I have a variable number of people involved in this snippet. It may be as little 3, as much as 6 or 7. All people get an approval. If one of them has an error getting an approval (Sometimes people get removed from security groups, external people not setup right, etc.) All people get an email (configure - > run after error). Otherwise they get an email with a direct responder link with me cc'd on it (we had a big issue where people couldn't find the approval link and I had to completely restart the process, this has been a life saver).

There are two quality of life features that I am looking to do:

1: The main topic, I want to do a reminder email for the specific person who hasn't voted yet. 

Let's say we have Bob, Thomas, Frank, and Sarah. They all get an approval. Bob, Thomas, and Sarah vote. It gets to be 7 days later and Frank has still not voted, he has gotten busy with work and it has been forgotten. 

I want a way to send an email in 7 days with a link to the response link and a reminder. I don't want Bob, Thomas, and Sarah to get the email, no point in shaming Frank. 

I am struggling here because I see people recommending the "do until x variable equals true or 1" trick, but since this in a loop, I only want this to be specific to the member. 

Any advice?

2: Is there any way to circumvent the 30 day time out flow process? Sometimes people on this process need 1-2 weeks to make a decision and then go on vacations or otherwise get busy for another 1-2 weeks. Sometimes these approvals fail due to the time. I see that the actual approval is valid for about a 1000 years, but since this is literally just step 1 our of 3 (or 4, depending on specific logic), it can't progress to the next stage. 

I have this set up so that every member who does vote, gets a record of it in a sharepoint list in an unrelated table. This has been a lifesaver because while it's in an apply to each loop where everyone hasn't yet voted, I can't see anything like who has voted or not.

Any advice on how to avoid having to restart the entire flow again and bugging every single person again?

[WBADAM03]

I tried this approach with another user who agreed to test this.

However, they instantly approved their approval. I had another user wait past 5 minutes.

Despite User1 approving instantly and User2 not approving, both User1 and User2 got a reminder email. 

I want it where only User2 gets a reminder email. 

I am a bit stuck on this

[rzaneti]

Hi @WBADAM03 ,

I ran some tests here, and Power Automate does not consider "True" (string) equals to True (expression):

So I recommend you to remove the expression from your 'Do until' test, letting just 'True' as string. 

Let me know if it works for you or if you need any additional help!

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[WBADAM03]

Hey there,

I tried what you suggested and it still does the same behavior. 

User 1 approves as soon as they physically can. user2 does not.

The delay function kicks off. 

User1 and User2 both get a reminder email. 

My desired behavior is that only the person who hasn't voted gets a reminder email.

In case this, I want only User2 to get an email, but user1 also gets an email

[rzaneti]

Hi @WBADAM03 ,

What is happening here?

After the 'Email notification', your flow is branched in two, and each of these branches will run simultaneously. As your first action from the 'right' branch is a 'Do until' loop with the stop set to the 'ReminderFlag' variable being equal to'yes', it will necessarily enter in the loop independent on the approval response. When you have your approval response (which is followed by the 'ReminderFlag' variable being set as 'yes'), the flow will be already inside your loop, so it will send the notification at least once. 

Also, the 'Do until' will run at least once before check the condition, so even if you make sure that the 'ReminderFlag' is not equal to 'true', you will have a notification.

Solution

1. Allocate the 'Delay' out of the 'Do until' loop and before it. By doing this, if your Approval response is sent before the 'Delay' deadline, the 'ReminderFlag' variable will be set as 'false' and your flow will not enter in the 'Do until' loop.

2. After the 'Delay', set a Condition to test if 'ReminderFlag' is equal to 'yes' and only run the 'Do until' if it is not.

Also, I saw in your last screen that you have two 'Set variable' actions assigning values to 'ReminderFlag' in the 'left' branch. I'm not sure if this is intentional, so I recommend you to double check it.

Let me know if it works or if you need any additional help!

[WBADAM03]

Hey rzaneti,

That makes since, without a delay, I'll try this out later this afternoon and check it out. I'll let you know if this worked or if I still have trouble with this. 

I wasn't even thinking that because there isn't a delay on the parallel path, it'll just happen once. Giving it a delay before the parallel path gives the ability to wait until the flag is actually set. 

What really confused me is that it is hard to "peak" code in power automate. So I wasn't sure if while in the apply for each loop (For every member in a sharepoint site) properly was working the way I want it to do with setting the flags. 

It's also a bit harder to wrap my head around without seeing code since there's concurrency on the apply to each for the approvals. 

[WBADAM03]

@rzaneti 
Hey there,

I tried this approach and it didn't work.

User1 approved it, user2 did not. 

No reminder email triggered. The delay timer was set to 2 minutes, please note that 3 minutes have elapsed in this screenshot. User2 should have gotten an email, but user2 did not. User1 also did not get an email.

My flow code: 

Any advice on what I am doing wrong?

My only thought is that because concurrency is on for the apply to each block (where the whole snippet is), that because user1 approves, that sets the flag to true but we don't have anything in the code to set it back to false if a user is still pending. I need concurrency on because if we send all approvals in this step sequentially, it will break when people fail to approve in a reasonable time (which is already an issue in the 30 requirement, hence the need for a reminder email).

What do you think?

[rzaneti · Accepted solution]

Hi @WBADAM03 ,

You seems to be right about the error: as we have only one variable tracking the flag for both users, when one of them approves the request, the variable is automatically set to 'yes', preventing the notification for the other. 

Let's work in the possible solution! You will need to do a small change in your design. Instead of work with a string variable with 'yes' and 'not' controls, I recommend you to initialize an array variable (let's call it as 'user_approved', or something like this). You will initialize this variable as empty. 

After your approval action, where you currently have the 'Set variable 13', remove it and add an 'Append to array variable' action, and set your approvers email to there (or any other property that you are using to identify the user). In the 'Condition' on the 'right' branch, where you are currently testing the 'flag' variable, you will now assign the 'user_approved' variable to the left input, set the dropdown as 'contains' and set the user email (or the property that you chose to identify it) at the right input. 

What will happen here? You will control who answered the approval request by adding the user email to the array variable. The notification loop will keep the same logic, but now the 'Condition' will test if your array variable contains the email of the user of the current iteration or not, entering in the 'do until' only when the user is not present in the array.

If the instructions above are not clear, don't worry: later today or tomorrow morning I can provide you with some screens to illustrate it. 

[WBADAM03]

Yes!

This finally worked. 

user1 did not approve but user2 did in fact approve. After the timer delay, user1 got a reminder email but user2 did not. User1 did not approve for another 3 minutes, user1 got another reminder email while user2 received neither reminders, (I changed this to 7 days to avoid bugging people in my business).

This was a brilliant idea and is super scalable for my flow. I have to build this out on another branch of my flow, but this is a huge lifesaver. You've saved me and my organization a lot of frustration!