Platform Academy Session #35 - April 27, 2023 - Flow Designer Approvals

Join us for our series of live sessions focused on platform topics like Automated Test Framework (ATF), Instance Scan, Upgrade Center, Source Control, and CICD, as well as everything Workflow Automation. This academy runs every other week, except for major holidays.
We'll have product experts on hand to demonstrate concepts, best/good practices, provide guidance, and answer your questions in a live setting.

Be sure to bring your questions, post them on the community events, on YouTube or post them during the live webinars.

Watch this session with Product Success Director Andrew Barnes and me for a detailed exploration of approvals in Flow Designer. Our discussion will cover various types of approvals, such as simple, multi-stage, complex, and scripted approvals.

The workaround discussed in this session applies to approvals in parallel branches with the "Do the following in parallel" flow logic. It will also enable sequential multi-stage approvals on instances prior to the Utah release.

* 00:00 Start, Welcome, and Introduction
* 02:06 Approvals on the Now Platform
* 10:36 Single-stage Approval
* 14:20 Multi-stage Approval: Sequential approval
* 15:50 Approval workaround
* 17:42 Complex Approval Rules: No branches
* 22:48 Demo: Complex parallel approval without branches
* 29:26 Complex Approval Rules: Parallel branches
* 32:06 Demo: Complex parallel approval with branches and workaround
* 40:13 Complex Approval Rules: Scripted
* 43:23 Decision Builder for Approvals and Change Approval Policies
* 49:55 Resources and Academy Wrap-up

You can find all past and future sessions on the Now Community:

Resources, videos, and more!

Community event post with resources
Center of Excellence Article on Flow Approvals

Decision Builder Academy
Other academies

Workflow Automation Center of Excellence
Getting Started with Flow Designer
Getting Started with Decision Builder

Idea Portal

[lorettabingham]

Good morning. I have a question. Can you add Flow Designer to "Catalog Items" that were created as "Quick Links". My client wants to use Flow Designer with their current Catalog Items. When I navigate to Self-Service > Employee Center. It opened to the Service Portal landing page. Next, I scrolled down to their "Quick Links" that were configure. Can I add "Flow Designer" to these type of catalog items?

[ReginaldFawcett]

I have a scenario where I have a catalog item with a multi row variable, where each one has an approver.
The approvals need to be processed in parallel, and tasks created for each MRV afterwards if approved.
I cannot use Do the following in Parallel, because I do not know how many approvals there will be (needs to be dynamic).
I cannot For Each, because the Approval waits for a response before going to the next approval.

What solution could I use in this case?

[miguelteixeira]

Hello,
I have a scenario where depending on a few field values the number of approvals may differ and they need to be sequential.
For instance, if the value of field Amount is >= "50000" I need to send sequential approvals to group 1, 2, 3 and 4 but if it is < "50000" I only need to send it to groups 1 and 3.
I have created a decision table to handle to which groups it should be sent, but I am having trouble finding a good solution to handle the sequential approval in my flow. I'd like to avoid having lots of nested ifs and else ifs, any suggestions?