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Approval sets

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Applies To: Project Operations for resource/non-stocked based scenarios, Lite deployment - deal to proforma invoicing

Approval sets group approval requests together into smaller subsets of operations. This grouping allows approvals to be processed by project, in a specific order and allows for retrying and sequencing. Grouping the approval requests together improves the reliability and traceability of approval processing for large volumes of approvals.

Approval sets indicate the overall processing state of their related records. When an approval record is processed using an approval set, the record moves from Submitted to Approved, and is no longer linked to the approval set. If a record fails when it is submitted for approval, the record remains in a status of Submitted and the approval set is marked as failed. The approval set logs the error message of the failure.

Processing approvals and approval sets

Approvals that are queued for processing are visible in the Processing Approvals view. The system processes all the entries multiple times asynchronously, including retrying an approval if previous attempts failed.

The Approval Set Lifetime field records the number of attempts left to process the set before it's marked as failed.

Approval sets are processed through the periodic activation based on a Cloud Flow named Project Service - Recurrently Schedule Project Approval Sets. This is found in the Solution named Project Operations.

Make sure that flow is activated by completing the following steps.

  1. As the administrator, sign in to flow.microsoft.com.
  2. In the upper-right corner, switch to the environment that you use for Dynamics 365 Project Operations.
  3. Select Solutions to list the solutions that are installed in the environment.
  4. In the solution list, select Project Operations.
  5. Change the filter from All to Cloud Flows.
  6. Verify that the Project Service – Recurrently Schedule Project Approval Sets flow is set to On. If it isn't, select the flow, and then select Turn on.
  7. Verify that processing occurs every five minutes by reviewing the System Jobs list in the Settings area within your Project Operations Dataverse environment.

Failed approvals and approval sets

The Failed Approvals view lists all of the approvals that require user intervention. Open the associated approval set logs to identify the cause of the failure. Selecting Retry adds to the approval set lifetime count, moves the approval set back to a status of Processing, and attempts to process the remaining records.

Configure approval sets

Enable the Approval sets feature

Before you enable the Approval sets feature, verify that there are no approvals currently being processed. After this feature is enabled, it can't be disabled.

  • Go to the Project parameters page and select Feature Control > Enable Modern Approvals.

Configuring the asynchronous threshold

When approval sets are created, processing moves to the background when the selected number of records for approval exceeds the indicated threshold. Use the Asynchronous Threshold field to configure when approval processing should be run synchronously or asynchronously. Select one of the following values:

  • Zero: All requests should be processed asynchronously.
  • Numbers greater than zero: Approvals are processed asynchronously only when the submitted number of approvals exceeds this value.