Forum Discussion

Iron Contributor

Dec 09, 2016

Microsoft Flow and document lifecycle for approving major versions

Is there any guidance on how to use Flow to manage document lifecycle with published versions with multiple approvals? This would require the option to trigger the flow from the drop down for a docum...

Chakkaradeep (Chaks) Chinnakonda Chandran

Former Employee

May 31, 2018

You should be able to build a document approval flow using the 'Set content approval status' action. This works with the SharePoint content approval feature. Here is my blog post that shows how to build this flow for a document library: https://www.chakkaradeep.com/2018/03/12/require-approval-of-documents-in-sharepoint-using-microsoft-flow/

You can also use this to approve list items, however, the ETag is something you don't need for list items while its required for documents when you manage the content approval status.

Robert Caretta
Copper Contributor
May 31, 2018
Yes I was able to get this working. The wrinkle is once it's approved, you can not change it with the workflow. It always throws an error.
- Chakkaradeep (Chaks) Chinnakonda Chandran
  Former Employee
  May 31, 2018
  Robert Caretta wrote:
  
  Yes I was able to get this working. The wrinkle is once it's approved, you can not change it with the workflow. It always throws an error.
  
  Can you explain what you mean by cannot change it once approved?
  - Robert Caretta
    Copper Contributor
    May 31, 2018
    If you attempt to apply a "Set content approval status" to an already approved item the flow will error out. "The current state of the item is Approved and the following action Submit cannot be implemented"
    
    You can however go into the individual item within the list itself and set back to "pending" manually. This is an odd scenario, I know. But I run into people changing their minds after the fact. Or an "oops" I clicked the wrong button, can you please help me? Never fails in my environment.

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