Flow - Multi-step approval and Setting users as Variables

Question

I'm working on an 8 step approval process for orders. This is going to get messy. And I would hate to have everyone's email addresses buried in the conditions. Is there a way to set

'Production Mgr'=Mike 'Production Mgr Email'= Mike@usa.com 'Accounting Mgr'=Sue 'Accounting Mgr Email'=Sue@usa.com

The only way I see is the initialize variable and I would have to have one for every single person / item. I already have several for info I bring over from a power app form.

It would be great if I could use their office365 tags, but I'll settle. I looked at the 'parse JSON' which if that's my only choice, ok. But I'm out of my depth on that and the easier it is for someone to maintain, the better.

Answer 1

You didn't specify if these roles are fairly static or if they need to be set for each approval.

If it is the first, one way of doing this would be to create a SharePoint list that serves as the configuration for your approvals. This will make it easy to change managers without touching the flow itself.

Then, I added a step to the flow that gets this item (Action: SharePoint - Get item):

Here, I just used the item ID - but you could make this more flexible by adding multiple items for different approval scenarios and using a query against the list instead.

Next, these values can be used directly in the approval step: