Asana Approval Section Workflow

Overview

This flow adds governed approvals to Asana boards. On an hourly schedule it scans the approval project for tasks sitting in an "Awaiting Approval" section, routes a Power Automate approval to the project owner, writes the recorded decision back onto the task as a comment, moves the task to the Approved or Changes Requested section, and notifies the team in Microsoft Teams.

Why it matters: Asana's native approval task type lacks the routing, audit trail, and Microsoft 365 integration of the Power Automate Approvals engine. This wraps Asana work in a tracked, auditable approval that lives where the rest of the business runs.

Idempotency by design: Because a processed task is moved out of the Awaiting Approval section into Approved or Changes Requested, the next poll never re-processes it — no state table is required.

Use Case

Teams that run deliverables in Asana want a real approval gate tied to a board section, with the decision recorded on the task and surfaced to the assignee in Teams. The project owner approves from Outlook, Teams, or the Approvals center; the task is auto-routed; everyone sees the outcome.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Connector	API name	Actions used
Asana	shared_asana	ListTasks AddComment
Approvals	shared_approvals	StartAndWaitForAnApproval
Microsoft Teams	shared_teams	PostMessageToConversation
HHTTP	http	GET /tasks/{id} (section memberships) POST /sections/{gid}/addTask

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Multi-stage approval

Chain a second StartAndWaitForAnApproval for high-value tasks before moving to Approved.

Approver routing

Replace the single owner email with a lookup (Dataverse map, Asana custom field, or project-owner API call) to route per project.

SLA escalation

Add a Do Until / age check to nudge or escalate approvals that sit unanswered.

Interim In Review section

Move tasks to a guard section while the approval is pending to prevent re-submission inside the same hour.

Tighter polling

Lower the recurrence interval (e.g. 15 min) for faster turnaround; Asana rate limits are generous for a single project.

Richer Teams card

Swap the HTML message for an Adaptive Card with the task link and a Reopen action.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

@and(not(equals(coalesce(body('Get_Task_Section_Memberships')?['data']?['completed'],false),true)), contains(string(body('Get_Task_Section_Memberships')?['data']?['memberships']), variables('varAwaitingSectionId')))

@outputs('Start_Owner_Approval')?['body/outcome']

@coalesce(first(outputs('Start_Owner_Approval')?['body/responses'])?['comments'],'(no comments provided)')

{ "data": { "task": "@{string(items('For_Each_Task')?['id'])}" } }

@equals(outputs('Compose_Approval_Outcome'),'Approve')

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