Long-lived approvals and flows on Common Data Service

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Microsoft Flow makes it easy to automate workflows that request approvals and act on their responses. Currently, flow runs time out after 30 days, causing any pending steps (like approvals) to time out as well. While this isn’t a problem for most approvals, there are cases where responding to an approval can take longer than 30 days.

With approvals stored in Common Data Service, you can now create flows that act on responses to approval requests, even after the original flow run times out. To do this, use two flows—one to send an approval request and the other to run business logic on the responses to the approval request, based on the new Create an approval (v2) action.

Get step-by-step instructions on how to create approval processes that run indefinitely.

In addition to the long-lived approval processes, flows built on Common Data Service that use the Common Data Service (current environment) connector can now last for up to one year - much longer than the current limit of 30 days. Like the solution flows that can be activated automatically on import, for a flow to have its runs last up to one year, it must only leverage the Common Data Service (current environment) connector and built-in actions.