“I’m building a reminder flow for an approval process, but I’m not sure how to add a link to the approval task created by Power Automate.”
If you’re using Power Automate flows to improve your approval processes, you probably want to send also some reminders. One approval notification can be easily forgotten, but with one notification every day it’s not so easy…
Yet reminder functionality is still missing in the Approvals app, and if you want to send reminders you’ll need a separate flow. And a part of such flow should be not only the list of requests, but also some reference to the approval tasks. What options do you have? How can you navigate users to the approval tasks?
Link to the task in the Approvals portal
One link, where you can navigate directly to a specific task, is a link to the Approvals portal in Power Automate. It’s the same link that’ll send you to the approvals page in the format below:
https://make.powerautomate.com/environments/<environmentId>/approvals/received
But that’s not all. With the approvals portal you can not only sent a link to the homepage, you can even send a link to a specific task. If you use the ‘Create an approval’ and ‘Wait for an approval’ instead of the ‘Start and wait for an approval’, you can access the task data in between, as explained in the article on deleting expired tasks. One of the available dynamic contents from the ‘Create an approval’ is the ‘Respond link’.
That’s a link that’ll send you directly to the task. If you store it somewhere between the Create and Wait, you can use it in your reminder emails. One email with multiple links, each leading directly to a specific task.
The downside is that you’re sending users to the Power Automate portal. It might be an environment they’re not used to work with, and they might be confused.
Link to the Approvals app in Teams
The second option, to let users work with what they already know, is to send them to the Approvals app in Teams.
They probably already user Teams, and the Approvals application is a nice addition. It’ll show them all their tasks and their current status at once.
The easiest way to get the url is to open your Teams in a web browser and take it from there.
Unlike the Approvals portal, it’s currently not possible to send a direct link to a task that’ll open in Teams… You can send just the full link and let the users find the open tasks and finish them.
Summary
As you can see, there’s currently not an easy and user friendly option to send a link to approval task from Power Automate. You can send a direct link to the Approvals portal, but it’s an unknown environment for many users. Or you can send a link to the Approvals app in Teams (if your organisation allows the app), but then users must search for the task themselves…