Approval Flows in Power Automate - Beginners Tutorial

Learn how to create advanced approval flows in Microsoft Power Automate. With this tutorial for beginners, you learn to set up an approval flow and, more importantly, handle the responses with expressions.

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00:00 Intro
Today we create an approval flow where we take user input, approve it Teams/Outlook, and let Power Automate send an email response to the user with the response from the approval flow.

00:47 Create an Input Form
We create an input form in Microsoft Forms. Here the employee will request holidays, which our approval flow will handle later. In Power Automate, we use the When a new response is submitted as a trigger. With a Get response details action, we collect the information from the Form and use it in Power Automate.

5:43 Create and wait for an approval
With the Create and wait for an approval action, we can send an item for approval to the user or users we specify. In addition, we can customize the approval form, e.g., Yes/No/Maybe instead of Approve/Reject. The approver can add comments to the approval, cancel the request, follow up (the approvers will get another notification), or reassign.

10:16 Extract Information from the Approval Response
When the approver reacts, our Power Automate receives the response as a JSON. Our job is now to extract the data from the JSON. Since one approval can have more responses, the responses come in an array in the body. So we handle the array of responses accordingly.

17:35 Send an Email with the Response
We use the extracted information from the approval response to create an email with a Send an email (V2) action. The To, Subject, and Body are all created dynamically. We use a combination of dynamic content and expressions.

22:45 Use Markdown for the Approval in Teams
You can use markdown to make your approval form in Teams/Outlook look better. We use bold for the descriptions and create an email link.

26:12 Handle the Approval Outcome
The outcome from the approval comes as either Approve and Reject. We want to use Approved and Rejected for our email, so we use a Switch action.

30:57 Get the Approval Comments
We use a WDL expression to get the comments from the approval. But we only want to show the comments if they're present: Therefore, an expression combining the functions empty and if is created. Finally, a concat function is added to combine the value of the dynamic comments with a static string.

41:32 Clickable Link with the Responder's Email
With some HTML knowledge, we can create a clickable link with the Responder's email and a custom text with their name.

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