Adding the Approval solutions to your Power Platform environment

When you create a new environment, you may expect your approval flows to work right out of the gate in Power Automate. However, approvals are connected to the Microsoft Flow Approvals and Microsoft Flow Approvals Core Solution solutions which need to be activated in a new environment (or when using approvals for the first time).

Side note: I also recently discovered that a Common Data Service (CDS) has appeared in my default environment. Initially, I was against the CDS in the default environment as users only have an Office 365 license and cannot access model-driven apps, so therefore I didn’t see a need for the CDS. However, the CDS database is needed for the approval solutions. To see how the approval actions store your approval data, you can view my previous post.

When you are in Power Automate or Power Apps, click on Solutions in the left menu. If you do not see the approval solutions previously mentioned, you will have to follow the instructions in this post to create the solutions. By default, you are presented with the following solutions.

To activate these solutions, go to Power Automate and go to Create on the left menu. Choose an Instant flow. Select Manually trigger a flow and give your flow a name and select Create.

The next action of your flow should be an approval action. Select Create an approval and send the approval to yourself.

On the top right, click Test. Select I’ll perform the trigger action and Save & Test.

You will be asked to sign into the Approvals connector using your credentials. Click Run flow.

This initial run will take between 5-10 minutes. You may think the flow has failed as it might say it’s timed out. To be sure, refresh your flow runs until the flow has actually finished.

Once the flow has successfully run, two new solutions will have appeared at the top of your Solutions page.

Now that the solutions are in your environment, all users are able to use the approval actions (and will not have to wait for up to 10 minutes for the approval to send)!