Send task approvals using activity feed notification (Graph APIs)

05/29/2025

This sample application streamlines the task approval process in Microsoft Teams, enabling users to send approval requests directly to their managers via activity feed notifications. Managers can quickly view and manage pending requests, making use of Teams SSO and Graph API to enhance productivity and collaboration in task management.

Included Features

Teams SSO (tabs)
Activity Feed Notifications
Graph API

Interaction with app

Broadcast from user

Try it yourself - experience the App in your Microsoft Teams client

Please find below demo manifest which is deployed on Microsoft Azure and you can try it yourself by uploading the app package (.zip file link below) to your teams and/or as a personal app. (Uploading must be enabled for your tenant, see steps here).

Send task approvals using activity feed notification: Manifest

Prerequisites

.NET Core SDK version 6.0

determine dotnet version
```
dotnet --version
```
dev tunnel or Ngrok (For local environment testing) latest version (any other tunneling software can also be used)
Teams Microsoft Teams is installed and you have an account
Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit for Visual Studio

Run the app (Using Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit for Visual Studio)

The simplest way to run this sample in Teams is to use Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit for Visual Studio.

Install Visual Studio 2022 Version 17.14 or higher Visual Studio
Install Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit for Visual Studio Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit extension
In the debug dropdown menu of Visual Studio, select Dev Tunnels > Create A Tunnel (set authentication type to Public) or select an existing public dev tunnel.
Right-click the 'M365Agent' project in Solution Explorer and select Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit > Select Microsoft 365 Account
Sign in to Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit with a Microsoft 365 work or school account
Set Startup Item as Microsoft Teams (browser).
Press F5, or select Debug > Start Debugging menu in Visual Studio to start your app
In the opened web browser, select Add button to install the app in Teams

If you do not have permission to upload custom apps (uploading), Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit will recommend creating and using a Microsoft 365 Developer Program account - a free program to get your own dev environment sandbox that includes Teams.

Setup

Register your Teams Auth SSO with Azure AD

Register a new application in the Microsoft Entra ID – App Registrations portal.
Select New Registration and on the register an application page, set following values:
- Set name to your app name.
- Choose the supported account types (any account type will work)
- Leave Redirect URI empty.
- Choose Register.
On the overview page, copy and save the Application (client) ID, Directory (tenant) ID. You’ll need those later when updating your Teams application manifest and in the appsettings.json.
Under Manage, select Expose an API.
Select the Set link to generate the Application ID URI in the form of api://{AppID}. Insert your fully qualified domain name (with a forward slash "/" appended to the end) between the double forward slashes and the GUID. The entire ID should have the form of: api://fully-qualified-domain-name/{AppID}
- ex: api://%ngrokDomain%.ngrok-free.app/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.
Select the Add a scope button. In the panel that opens, enter access_as_user as the Scope name.
Set Who can consent? to Admins and users
Fill in the fields for configuring the admin and user consent prompts with values that are appropriate for the access_as_user scope:
- Admin consent title: Teams can access the user’s profile.
- Admin consent description: Allows Teams to call the app’s web APIs as the current user.
- User consent title: Teams can access the user profile and make requests on the user's behalf.
- User consent description: Enable Teams to call this app’s APIs with the same rights as the user.
Ensure that State is set to Enabled
Select Add scope
- The domain part of the Scope name displayed just below the text field should automatically match the Application ID URI set in the previous step, with /access_as_user appended to the end:
  - `api://[ngrokDomain].ngrok-free.app/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/access_as_user.
In the Authorized client applications section, identify the applications that you want to authorize for your app’s web application. Each of the following IDs needs to be entered:
- 1fec8e78-bce4-4aaf-ab1b-5451cc387264 (Teams mobile/desktop application)
- 5e3ce6c0-2b1f-4285-8d4b-75ee78787346 (Teams web application)
Navigate to API Permissions, and make sure to add the follow permissions:

Select Add a permission
Select Microsoft Graph -> Delegated permissions.
- User.Read (enabled by default)
- Directory.Read.All
- Directory.ReadWrite.All
- ChatMessage.Send
- Chat.ReadWrite
- TeamsActivity.Send
- TeamsAppInstallation.ReadWriteForUser
- TeamsAppInstallation.ReadWriteSelfForUser
- TeamsAppInstallation.ReadForUser.
Select Microsoft Graph -> Application permissions.
- TeamsActivity.Send
- Directory.Read.All
- TeamsAppInstallation.ReadWriteForUser.All
- TeamsAppInstallation.ReadWriteSelfForUser.All
- TeamsAppInstallation.ReadForUser.All.
Click on Add permissions. Please make sure to grant the admin consent for the required permissions.

Navigate to Authentication If an app hasn't been granted IT admin consent, users will have to provide consent the first time they use an app. Set a redirect URI:
- Select Add a platform.
- Select Single page application.
- Enter the redirect URI for the app in the following format: https://{Base_Url}/Auth/End, https://{Base_Url}/Auth/Start Enable implicit grant by checking the following boxes:
  ✔ ID Token ✔ Access Token
Navigate to the Certificates & secrets. In the Client secrets section, click on "+ New client secret". Add a description(Name of the secret) for the secret and select “Never” for Expires. Click "Add". Once the client secret is created, copy its value, it need to be placed in the appsettings.json.
Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/OfficeDev/Microsoft-Teams-Samples.git

Open the code in Visual Studio

File -> Open -> Project/Solution
Navigate to folder where repository is cloned then samples/tab-request-approval/csharp/TabRequestApproval.sln

Run ngrok - point to port 3978

ngrok http 3978 --host-header="localhost:3978"

Alternatively, you can also use the dev tunnels. Please follow Create and host a dev tunnel and host the tunnel with anonymous user access command as shown below:

devtunnel host -p 3978 --allow-anonymous

Setup and run the bot from Visual Studio: Modify the appsettings.json and fill in the following details:

{MicrosoftAppId} - Generated from Step 3 (Application (client) ID)is the application app id
{TenantId} - Generated from Step 3(Directory (tenant) ID) is the tenant id
{MicrosoftAppPassword} - Generated from Step 14, also referred to as Client secret
{Base_URL} - Your application's base url. E.g. https://12345.ngrok-free.app if you are using ngrok.
Press F5 to run the project

Modify the manifest.json in the /AppPackage folder and replace the following details:

${{AAD_APP_CLIENT_ID}} with Application id generated from Step 3
${{TAB_DOMAIN}} with base Url domain. E.g. if you are using ngrok it would be https://1234.ngrok-free.app then your domain-name will be 1234.ngrok-free.app and if you are using dev tunnels then your domain will be like: 12345.devtunnels.ms.

Zip the contents of AppPackage folder into a manifest.zip, and use the manifest.zip to deploy in app store or add to Teams using step 19.
Upload the manifest.zip to Teams (in the Apps view click "Upload a custom app")

Go to Microsoft Teams and then go to side panel, select Apps
Choose Upload a custom App
Go to your project directory, the ./AppPackage folder, select the zip folder, and choose Open.
Select Add in the pop-up dialog box. Your app is uploaded to Teams.

Note: App should be installed for user's manager also to get task approval notification.

Note: If you are facing any issue in your app, please uncomment this line and put your debugger for local debug.