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Documents that incorporate sensitive information often crave approvals. With the content approval feature in SharePoint, you tin put a simple blessing procedure for documents in a specific document library. Using this content approving process, documents pending approval will not be visible to users until they are approved.

Manage the content approval settings in the library settings page:

Content approval settings

Settings > Versioning settings > Require content approval for submitted items

Later on this setting is enabled, when users upload documents to this specific library, the certificate's Approval Condition is either in:

  • Draft (if minor and major versions are enabled) or
  • Pending (if only the major version is enabled) state

Y'all can always visit the document library to approve and reject documents merely this exercise is tedious. It requires receiving notifications virtually the awaiting document(s), finding the appropriate document(s) for approval, then identifying approvers, and finally generating the command to approve/reject the document(south).

Alternatively, why not automate this approval process using a flow?

Content approval flow in Ability Automate

You can automate this entire content approval process using an approving catamenia. When approved, the content approval condition of the document is automatically set to Approved; if rejected, the flow sets the content approval status of the certificate to Rejected.

To set up the content approval status of the document, with the SharePoint connector, use the Prepare content approval status activeness in the flow.

The post-obit actions occur:

  1. Power Automate uses a SharePoint trigger when a new file is added to the library.
  2. Get file metadata provides the ETag belongings (along with many others) required when dealing with content approvals.
    • ETag is a special identifier that identifies the specific version of that item awaiting approval.
  3. Start an approving action:
    • Include people for blessing the documents.
    • Approvers should be either Site Owners or Site Members.
    • If you are managing users in SharePoint groups, brand sure approvers are role of the Blueprint permission-level group.
  4. If approval response is approved:
    • Set content approving status of the document to Approved.
    • Send an electronic mail to the document writer regarding the blessing forth with any comments.
  5. If approving response is not approved:
    • Set content approval status of the certificate to Rejected.
    • Send an email to the document author regarding the rejection along with any comments.

Setting up the menses in Power Automate

Using the following template, create a flow in Ability Automate.

  1. In the SharePoint library, from the command bar, select Integrate > Power Automate > Create a menstruation.
  2. Next, select the template: When a new file is added in SharePoint, consummate a custom action.

File add custom action

  1. Add the actions every bit described in the previous steps.

Flow content approval full

Set content approval status activeness

The content approval action requires the following entries:

  • SharePoint site
  • Library proper name
  • Identifier of the item (in this case, the document ID)
  • Content blessing activeness
  • Comments

To see the ETag, expand Show advanced options.

Note

While the content blessing activity help says that ETag is optional, it is required for documents and pages while it may be optional for list items.

Content approval status Approve

You must ensure you enter the correct site and library proper name. All the same, you can go the rest of the values from the previous deportment in the flow.

  • Identifier
    • Using the Id property from the trigger output
  • Comments
    • Using the comments property from the approving response
    • ETAG
  • Using the ETag property from the Become file metadata action output

You tin can now use the content approval condition activeness to corroborate and turn down the document based on the blessing response.

The end result is that:

  1. After the flow is triggered, approvers go an email to corroborate/pass up the document with the document link.
  2. Approvers can now:
    • If your email customer supports Outlook-actionable messages: Approve it within the email using actionable messages if your Outlook customer supports information technology.
    • If your email client does not support Outlook-actionable messages: Select Approve or Reject that takes you lot to Power Automate site where y'all can approve or pass up the document.
  3. After approving or rejection:
    • Document creator receives an email with the blessing status forth with the approval comments.

Email approval status

This is an constructive fashion to automate document approval in SharePoint using Power Automate! Use this process for list items and pages as well.