Upgrade Your Approval Requests : Add a Dynamic Table to Your Power Automate Approval Requests

Power Automate is a powerful tool that allows you to automate business processes by creating workflows between different apps and services.

One of the many features of Power Automate is the ability to create dynamic tables and add them in details in an approval e-mails. This can be useful in many scenarios, such as when you need to send a report to someone for approval before proceeding with the next step.

While adding a dynamic table in an approval email in Power Automate can be a useful feature, there are some limitations to consider. Because the HTML table is not supported in the markdown.

For further information about the markdown supprot in approval requests: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/approvals-markdown-support

In this article, we will guide you through the steps to create a dynamic table in Power Automate and add it in details in approval.

Step 1: Create a dynamic table

To start, you need to create a dynamic table that will pull data from the data source. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Add a "Get items" action to your flow.
2. Select the SharePoint site and list from which you want to get the items.
3. Configure the filter query to get the specific items you want to include in the table.
4. Add a "Select" action to your flow.
5. Specify the columns you want to include in the table.

Now run the flow and copy the body of select action we will need it later.

Step 2:Add Parse JSON action

In the Content section: put the output of the select action.

And for the Schema section: Paste the body of the select action that you had copied it from the previous step.

Step3: Initialize variable

Now , add the Initialize variable . Name it for example "Message approval" and in the type select String.

For the Value put your colmuns name seperated with "|" then return to the line and add the same number of your columns but instead of the name of the column put "--" with the same length of the name of each column as in the picture below.

Don't forget to separte them with "|".

Step4: Add the content of your list to the table

1. Add an apply to each action .

2.Put in the output the Body of the Parse JSON action.

3.Add an Append to string variable:

• In the name choose: your first variable that you had initialized in step3.
• For the value:Return to the line and put the columns name separated with "|" but this time for the columns name choose them from the dynamic content of the Parse JSON action.

Step5: Start and wait for approval

Finally, add the action Start and wait for approval.

Choose the type that you want , title and the person to who you assign this approval request and in the details section put the "Message approval" variable.

After runing your flow the approval mail will be like this:

Attention:

This method only work with e-mails and don't work with Teams approval! Tables are not supproted and you will have something like this: