Creating a Playbook with Approval Links and Timeout Handling
First, you need an action that sends the approval link to the relevant person. The best way to do this is with a Send Email action, as it allows you to embed the approval link directly in the message. See more in Public Documentation.
Next, you must create a dummy action, such as Case Comment, that will be the target of the approval link as displayed below
Within this action, set the "If step fails" setting to "Skip step." This is critical for handling timeouts. If the recipient doesn't click the link within the "Time to respond" (e.g., 5 minutes), the action will "fail," but the playbook won't stop. Instead, it will skip this action and continue to the next step, allowing you to handle the timeout scenario.
After your dummy approval action, add a Condition Flow to handle the different outcomes: approved, declined, or timed out.
How it works:
Approved: If the recipient clicks the approval link from the email, the dummy action (Siemplify_CaseComment_1 in this example) will execute successfully. The condition [Siemplify_CaseComment_1.SuccessStatus] will be “true”, and the playbook will follow the "Approved" branch.
Declined: If the user declines the request, the action will not execute, and a placeholder wouldn’t be resolved with a value. The condition contains “SuccessStatus” is basically checks if placeholder is not resolved, e.g remains as [Siemplify_CaseComment_1.SuccessStatus].
Timed Out (Else): If no response is received within the "Time to respond," the action is skipped. The Else branch is then used to handle this scenario as both above conditions wouldn’t be met and placeholder will be empty.
