Responses so it's not just a black white yes no response but that's enough of looking at me I feel I'm going to vanish Avatar will now take over and let's get started so white owl have launched a film club it meets every Thursday and what we do is watch a film which somebody's chosen and there was a bit of argument about how to choose the films so what we've created is a SharePoint list in which people can submit their suggestions and those suggestions will then go away.
For approval and they'll either be accepted or rejected this is a fairly typical use of approval process you could use it for Holiday applications or expense applications or anything else for that matter I'll leave it up to you to decide whether this is actually based on fact or not in this case so what will happen when somebody submits a new film here is a trigger will be occur within a flow and then we'll start and wait for an approval.
So what will happen then is in teams a little approval message will pop up here saying somebody submitted this film do you want to approve it and if somebody says yes or no we'll go down two different paths so let's have a look at those two paths if they say no which is selected here by default then what will happen is that it will flag it in sharepointers haven't been rejected and they'll get an email telling them of the disappointing decision so in SharePoint this field will be set.
To false it hasn't been approved and will give the feedback why the decision was made the alternative is it goes down the approval pass it's all good it's been accepted in which case firstly we'll line the film up for watching so we'll add it to the Excel spreadsheet of accepted films in which case it will appear as the second film in this list the second thing it will do is it will allowing for the loop it will send an email to the person telling their film has been accepted.
Spreadsheet send an email congratulating the person their successful choice and update the SharePoint list if on the other hand is rejected we'll send an email commiserating the person for their bad choice and we'll update the SharePoint list to say the film wasn't accepted so that's what a an approval process is and does what I now do is show a demonstration of what we've just described in action so what I'm going to do now is to add two films we'll add the Matrix which surely any film club would accept I'm.
Allowed Titanic just to annoy uh my colleague Andrew which will reject so to add a new film to the SharePoint list we click on the new button and we can type in the title so the Matrix justification best documentary ever made it's a slightly personal View at the moment there's no point setting the approval status or giving the feedback comment but we will say that the person who has submitted it was myself delegate 51 and I'll save that and then.
I'll just quickly add another film and this will be Titanic and I'll put just because I can't think of a good reason and I'll say I submitted that one too so that's submitted by delegate 51 also so that would have triggered the flow twice now what I'm going to do is take a pause now and we'll come back to this in a short while so I reckon that was about two to three minutes I had to wait until these messages popped up in teams and we'll talk about why they're not popping up in.
Outlook uh during the tutorial so what I'll do is Click on each of these two requests so let's start with this one and you can see it tells me the details of the film The Matrix best documentary ever made tells me a bit about it I can add my comments here um why not say yes I'll put as my comment and I'll approve it you can see I've just got my notification saying it was approved and what I will now do is to click on the second request and I'm sorry about the pings coming out by the way and for this.
One I'll say no I'll say Andrews Andrew says no because he would and we'll reject that and we'll have another bit of a ping I'm afraid so if I now go to look at my list of films you can see that I've Had The Matrix added there with the date and time and if I go to look at my original SharePoint list you can see it's changed the details of it I may just need to okay it turned out I did need to refresh my SharePoint list and you can see here.
Posts Related:
- How To Add A Responsive Navbar To Your Blogger Website - Live Blogger BlogSpot
- Effective Performance Reviews
- How To EASILY Add Checkboxes To ANY Microsoft Excel Table
What's been added the Matrix was the one I successfully accepted and so that's
Been marked as approved and Titanic was the one that I rejected and that's been marked as not approved so you can see the approval process has worked I think it's time now to create the actual flows to put this into practice so the first thing we need to do is to set up our SharePoint list our Excel and our Excel workbook so let's do that so.Starting with SharePoint what I'll do is create a new list I'll create a blank list and I'll call it wise owl Movie Club I've used Wiseau film club previously as a name and even though I've deleted it it doesn't actually seem to accept it so I'll create that and then what we'll do is add the columns so I've got one for the film title I just need to add four more columns so the first one is a multiple lines of text column and this will hold the justification for why we think this is a good film.
It's about justification and I'll choose save this I'm going for a minimal minimalist list so we're not adding any descriptions or anything the second column will be a yes no field saying whether it's approved or not so I'll call this if approved the third column I'm adding is going to be the feedback from it so it's multiple lines of text I guess and this will be filled in when the film is approved or not and the final column if I could just get to that will be who submitted it so that.
Will be a text field and I'll call it submitted by choose safe and just to prove this is working I'm going to add one film in already before I start my approval process I'm going to add The Sound of Music y a device that alone justifies it and I'll save that and it's being approved because that's the default setting so I just possibly need to go in and change the default.
Setting of that column so go to column settings edit I'm just going to change the default value from yes to no and from now on new new films won't be approved so that's my list what I now need to do is create my Excel workbook so what I'm going to do is add a new Excel workbook within this folder and it's going to have three headings so the first one will be the date the second one will be the film and the third one will be chosen by who.
Chose it I'm just going to do a bit of preempted column widening there um I'll rename that and I'll call it chosen films but my Excel spreadsheet isn't actually useful at the moment because it doesn't contain a table so I won't be able to do anything with it in the power automate so what I'm going to do is add in a single film to make my table easier to create and to work with I'll put in The Sound of Music which has already been approved I think.
Chosen by delegate 51 and then I'll turn this into a table if you're wondering how I put the date in it's control semicolon puts today's date in so what I can now do to create a table is select any cell within my block of data choose insert and choose table my table does have headers and then I'm going to go to the table design tag and rename my table and I'll call it just films had I not done that when I got to the point of trying to add a row into this.
Table in power automate I'd have no way to do that because there is no table so it's time to create our flow so if you click on the create button to create a flow I'm going to choose an automated Cloud flow but then skip the next stage and what I'll do is give my flow a name I'll call it approval process for film suggestions and the trigger will come from SharePoint it'll be somebody adding in a SharePoint item or SharePoint to a list so when an item is created is the one I want.
And I need to choose my SharePoint site or site address which is how I automate video tutorial and I need to choose the list which is why is our movies Club so then I can add a step after that and what this step will do is trigger the approval process so there is a whole category of stages for approvals and they basically divide into three this starting way from approval of text has been added relatively recently and if an AI system is generating some text.
To send as part of an email this gives a human the chance to check it before it goes out maybe in a future tutorial I'll cover
That two other options are creating approval and wait for an approval and what that does is divide the process of the approval process into two separate stages if you want to learn more about that what I recommend is Googling it my advice would be to ignore them 95 of people will always want this one start and wait for an approval I think the only two reasons to divide it up into the two separate actions are.One if you want to have more control over the approval email going out and even make sure it actually is an email which is unless you will come to later and secondly if you think it may be more than 30 days between you asking for approval and actually getting it because what happens with start and wait for an approval is after after excuse me after 30 days Microsoft just forget about it understandably there's only so long their servers can hold something in their minds so we're going to choose start and wait for an approval which as I say which.
Should be sufficient for nearly everybody what's the approval type you've got uh three choices really custom responses we'll get to later towards the end of this tutorial for the moment we'll choose between the first two I'm happy as soon as somebody gets a an approval request if they say that film's okay I'm going to take that as as valid I'm not going to wait for everyone to reply so I'm going to choose first to respond.
As we'll see later this doesn't necessarily mean that power ultimate realizes we've only got one response can ever come in the title this is what will appear in the approval request so I'll say suggestion or film to watch and I'll assign it to two people myself delegate 51. and my very very good friend the good 52..
Uh as for the details this is what will appear so what I'm going to do is put the film title in and I'll pick up in the title which just just been added in SharePoint and then I'll always also explain the justification for it so this is why someone thinks it's a good film to watch and add the justification field I won't bother with any other settings here like linked back to the item I'll save that and that's my approval action so it's time now to add a condition but just before I do that I'm going to add another new step in to initialize a.
Variable and what I will do is just for the sake of convenient convenience I'll capture the crater film Creator's email address and a string variable called email address if I scroll down here to the list of things created for me by power ultimate when somebody added an item to the SharePoint list you can see somewhere here is the created by email address I think I've just gone over it so that means I don't have to think about that next time I can just refer to my variable.
Right condition time so what I'll do is add a condition and the condition will test whether this film has been approved or not so I can click in the Box to choose a value and I can choose from one of many bits of information about the approval this is typical power automate and you think which of these do I need if you choose the outcome of the approval it has the advantage that it won't create and apply to each Loop which Loops over all the different responses.
You received even though I know that we've said we'll accept the First Response as we'll see soon it often creates a separate Loop over all the different responses even though we know there's only one of them but if you choose outcome it won't create and apply to each Loop it will have the intelligence to realize that at the end of the process of people uh receiving their approval requests they'll be either yes or no either it's approved or not approved and what I want to do here is Type in the word approve.
And you need to type in the word approve I just ran this created an entire video based on typing in approved there and found that I've got it wrong so please make sure you type in the word approved just like that otherwise you two may have to re-record your entire video can you hear the pain in my voice so now we've done the condition that we can go on to the right hand side of the loop and say what happens if the film is rejected because I'm a natural pessimist and then we'll go on to the yes side and we'll say hey what happens if it was actually accepted.
So we're going to start with whether the film was rejected or not I think I'll just rename this and put accepted or rejected to make it clear what's going on because it seems like I can't rename the actual conditions here so if it was rejected we want to do two things the first thing we need to do is go to our SharePoint list and we need to set approve to false and put some feedback as to why and the second thing we need to do is we need to send an email to the person concerned saying I'm sorry your film.
Didn't make the cut so we'll add a new action to do those two things the first thing was updating an item in SharePoint so we can choose SharePoint and we can choose to update an item it always takes me ages to find things in SharePoint lists update item is it there it is and I can choose which list I'm going to it'll be the same one as I was adding something to choose my list name which is Wiseau Movie Club and I could choose the ID.
And it automatically exposes the only possible thing I could actually use which is the idea of the SharePoint item created which is what triggered this flow running in the first place so now what I can do is to set various parameters the one I always want to choose is to set the approve to know it's a default anyway and what I want to do is set the feedback to the comments typed in by the person who approved or rejected the action in this case rejected it so to do that I can look at all the list of things you get when someone.
Processes and approval and right at the bottom of the list is the response comments and those are the comments someone typed in alongside saying yes or no and we'll be able to pick up on those now the moment I chose that something strange happened it added an applied to each Loop and that's because even though I've mentioned this already in this tutorial even though I know there can only ever possibly be one response because I've said I will accept the first one it doesn't have the intelligence and to.
Realize that I've chosen that and still insists that I Loop over all of the responses received processing each in turn now I'm 100 certain that there will only can only ever be one response so this applied to each Loop you can just pretty much ignore it will only execute once but it's still slightly annoying that it created and slightly confusing going back to my update item what I found when running this is that I need to set the title if this was something like a SQL update statement I.
Wouldn't need to do that I could just say well I'm changing the approval and changing the feedback but it seems like I need to check set all the other fields too so what I'll do is set the title back to what be what it was when it was added I.E not change it and just in case I'll set the justification back to what the justification was when I added it and check change excuse me the submitted by field to whatever the submitted by field was when I added it to me it doesn't seem like I should have.
To do those two things that I do so that's my updating the SharePoint item what I can now do is add another action which will send an email to the person concerned I need to stay within my Loop because I need to pick up on the comments from the response so I'll add another item to send an email and I'll choose send an email and first I'll send it to is the email address I've stored that in a variable for some reason it doesn't come up with.
Dynamic content there but I can easily enough choose it my subject will be so sorry you should always fake sincerity if even if you don't believe in it and my email will say well it will give the name of the film The Fill name or the movie name for the you Americans watching and the movie name will be the title which I can get from where I updated it because that will be the original title repeated and I can also put in a reason for.
Rejection everyone wants to know why they've been rejected and for this I can either put the feedback there what I said the feedback to or I can go back and choose the original response comments but I'll choose a feedback so with a bit of luck that will update the SharePoint list and send me an email but just as a little post script to this there's always something to catch you out I put a question mark in my action name for accepted or rejected and has come up with an error for that so what I just need to do.
Is correct that or you'll all be wondering why it's not working get rid of the question mark and if I save that it should accept it so sorry about that slight error before we continue on the approval path Let's test the rejection one what I'm going to do is create a really bad film in my list except it's not really I quite enjoyed it went on a bit why is Titanic included in the list uh because it's the Celine Dion song I think it was Celine Dion and submitted by let's put delegate 51.
I'm not actually convinced I'm using that field and we'll save that so that will automatically trigger the flow now you may expect it to turn up in the delegate 51 and delegate 52 email inboxes but it won't and I have tried so many things to get it to appear if you Google Power automate approvals not sending email you'll see I'm not the only person to wonder why this is going wrong many people have been discussing it a couple of seduce excuse me suggestions.
Have been put forward to do with the approval task one is to go to Advanced options and make sure that you've set a requester that seems to have no effect and the second thing is to make sure that you've enabled notifications so people actually know they're being asked to approve films but that's turned on by default anyway I have tried many many things I cannot get this to work these notifications will not show up by email if you can find a solution to that please do let me know and I'll share it.
So instead of that you can go to teams and what you should see is a notification turns up here but we've got to wait how long probably takes about typically a minute or two for this to pop up so there's my approval request suggestion for film to watch Titanic Celine Dion nope not impressed with that and what I'm going to do is say Andrew hates Titanic as a reason not to accept this film and I'm going to reject it.
So what that will do is trigger the action and do two things firstly it will send me an email to my delegate 51 who's myself as that happens saying I'm so sorry and you can see there's filled in the details the name of the film and the reason I've rejected it and the second thing it will do in the SharePoint list is to mark it as having been rejected and if I can't see that what I may need to do is just refresh the page although sometimes I found this doesn't work either so you can see it's not approved and is.
Added in the feedback as Andrew hates Titanic so that side is all worked perfectly now if we look at the list of chosen films you'll see it hasn't added it to the Excel spreadsheet why should it I didn't ask it to so now I've tested the rejection path let's be brave and add the acceptance path so for the acceptance path I need to do three things I need to change the SharePoint item to say it's approved and to add the feedback I need to send an email saying that it's been accepted breaking the bad good news rather and I.
Also need to add the film to the Excel spreadsheet of the scheduler films to watch so let's start doing the first one the last one first rather we'll add a row to an Excel spreadsheet so if you scroll down this list you'll see there's one which says add a row into a table the location of this is OneDrive of business the document library is OneDrive the file is in the folder called approvals and it's called chosen films and the table.
It's called films as to the row we want to add we want to set the date the First Column to be today's date and what I can do is use an expression for that so I could scroll down and find a set of date functions I'm sure but I'm going to use the memory that is UTC now and just type that in and that will fit in today's date and time as it happens the film is a title someone just tried adding so what I can do is scroll down this list until I find the item when the item.
Is created pick up in the film title and put that in and the person who chose it I'll just fill in the email address of the person because I've got that available in a variable so that's added the film to my schedule what I can now do is generate an action to update my SharePoint list choose SharePoint and I can choose to update the item which always takes me ages to find I'm almost going to cheat let's see if I can find it update file update item right at.
The bottom that time they were now for better good order but I swear they're not always so I can choose power automate video tutorial I can choose my list as being the wisel movie club and that's for the ID I'm updating well it's the record I just tried adding so it's available for me there I want to set my title now for this I can do exactly what I did for the rejection phrase so for the title I can pick up on it's always tempted to choose the title there which is something completely different very misleading so I can pick up on the title of the item I just created the.
Name of the film I can pick up an adjustification search for it you can set the I'm probably not interested in the submitted by but I guess having added the field I should actually keep it like I said approved to be yes I approve it and the feedback reason will be the comments added by the responder so there'll be at the bottom of my list of possible bits of information available when someone approves or rejects um request.
