Approvals inside a flow

In one line. An XFlow runs its steps without stopping for a person; to have a person approve between two agents, split the work at a lifecycle stage a person acts on. You’ll be able to. Say what an XFlow can and cannot wait for, chain an agent, a person’s approval and a second agent, choose who may approve, and know where an agent’s own approvals apply. Where this lives. Studio ▸ Agents ▸ Agent Toolkit ▸ Agents for the XFlows and the agent’s Governance tab, and Studio ▸ Data ▸ Collections ▸ <collection> ▸ Lifecycle for the stage where the person approves.

Can a person approve in the middle of a flow?

Not inside one XFlow. The XFlow editor’s Add to flow palette has no approval step and no step that waits for a person: nothing on the canvas pauses a run until someone decides. Once it starts, an XFlow does not stop to wait for anyone’s decision. (What the palette does hold is in XFlow node reference.)

What does work is to put the person between two XFlows. The first XFlow ends by handing the document to a review stage; a person approves by moving the document on; that move starts the second XFlow. The stage is the pause, and the person’s move is the approval.

Agent, then a person, then an agent

This works on documents in a collection, because the pause is one of the collection’s lifecycle stages (Taxonomy, lifecycle, tags & events).

The stage where the person approves. In the collection’s Lifecycle tab, open the stage the person works in — the default lifecycle’s L1 Review is one. Turn on Send to Inbox (human review): a document that reaches the stage appears in the project’s Inbox. Under Show Advanced Settings, list in Can be moved to where the person may send it next — Approved and Declined, say — and pick the personas who approve in Can be viewed by.
The first XFlow. Click + Agent ▸ XFlow, name it, and Save. On the canvas, drag an Agent Operator and set it to call the first agent. Then drag Move To State, set its Workflow to the collection’s lifecycle and Move to state to the review stage, leave Skip Automation Trigger off, and connect the two. Save.
The second XFlow. Create another XFlow. In its Add XFlow dialog, set Trigger to Document State and Stage to the stage an approved document moves to (Approved). On its canvas, drag an Agent Operator that calls the second agent. Save.
Try it. Run the first XFlow on a document (Execute ▾ ▸ Document Run). Open the Inbox, click Open on the document, and move it to Approved. The second XFlow’s run appears on its Runs tab.

A declined document stops: the second XFlow starts only for the stages picked in its Stage field. To act on a decline too, give a third XFlow the Document State trigger on Declined.

Who can approve

The person who approves is whoever may act on the document at the review stage:

Can be viewed by on the stage decides which personas see documents resting there. Left empty, everyone who can see the collection does.
Their role must let them review documents. The default lifecycle comes with an L1-Reviewer and an L2-Approver persona for its two review stages (Human-in-the-loop).
The Inbox is where they find the work — it offers Open, Snooze and Dismiss, not an approve button. They approve on the document itself by moving it to the next stage, and the Inbox item clears on its own.

Every move is recorded with who made it, so the approval is on the record (Audit & compliance).

An agent’s own approvals are for conversations

An agent can also ask a person before it acts: on its Governance tab, under Approvals, a tool or a team member set to Approval required makes the agent stop and ask. The question appears as a card in the conversation, with Approve and Reject.

That card needs a conversation to appear in. When the agent runs as a step of an XFlow there is no conversation and nowhere to answer, so an agent’s own approvals are not a way to put a person inside a flow. Use a review stage, as above.

Where to go next

XFlows & pipelines — building, running and triggering an XFlow.
Human-in-the-loop — the Inbox, review stages and four-eyes decisions.
Taxonomy, lifecycle, tags & events — stages, and who can move a document between them.