Introduction:

In my previous article (Link) we saw how to send approval reminder notification for approval record on approval table. Now there can be a case that people would not want the notification for whole system approval records but for specific tables like for example change record. So in this article we are doing to see how to send approval reminder notification for approving the change record and after the final record we are going to cancel the change and cancel the approvals as well. This can be easily extended to other task based record in future.

There are few questions which i saw on our community like what should we do to send approval reminders for RITM, Change Request after every alternate day or after every 2 days. Also there were scenarios like people wanted to send notification only in business hours and exclude holidays as well. So flow designer gives an advantage here to use schedule and send notification only in that schedule. We also have an advantage that we dont have to create a flag or field on change record to maintain last notification date time our counter.

Use case:

1) Send Reminder Notification using flow designer for each approver for change record.

2) Cancel the change record and approvals after final reminders is sent.

Solution:

Flow Designer on change record which loops through all the approval records associated with it if not approved then it will send notifications to each approver.

We are going to trigger this flow when the change approval moves to Requested and state is assess.

2) Action:

Here we are have divided the action part in 3 sections as you can see that A,B and C. Just before going to this section i would like to tell you that we have used 1 min timer to test this flow meaning we are waiting for 1 min before sending that approval reminder emails. You can use your schedule and your timer condition as well.

Flow Section A: You can see that after one minute we are looping through all the approval records associated with this change record if the change is in approval=requested state. After looping through each approval record we will send email to each approver, this is first reminder notification.

Flow Section B: In this section we are again waiting for one min to check if the reminder notification sent in this place is acknowledged or not. If not then again loop through each approval record and send final reminder notification to each approver.

Flow Section C: Here we are again waiting for one min just to give them buffer or a tolerance to respond to the final reminder notification sent in step 2.4.2.3. If change is still not approved then it will cancel the change record and all approvals will also get cancelled associated with this change request.

Thanks and Regards,
Ashutosh Munot

ServiceNow MVP 2019/2020

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