I have an odd situation with a customer’s workflow I can’t quite figure out. A document needed four approvals, but the fourth person missed it because it didn’t show up in their Approval Requests.
The approval counter was set to 3/1, instead of 3/4, which explained why it wasn’t in their Approval Requests (it was technically approved)
I’m trying to figure out how that happened. When asking a user for their approval, is it the “Required” checkbox that increases the Required approvals counter?
In the workflow, at user approval i have both a Request Approval task (set to required) AND a User Approval task (also set to required). All instances where approval happens in the workflow are configured like this.
The final approval is in a 2nd workflow - do approval counts reset when transferring to a new workflow? I don’t believe they do
If not that, what else could cause the approval required count to reset/not increment?
I can’t say for sure if the approvals will reset when changing workflows as I’ve not review this, but you could add a few Replace tasks to capture the Approval Count, Approvals Required and Is Approved values at the end of the first workflow and the beginning of the new workflow, then evaluate the recording(s) to see if they have changed.
I would also confirm that there isn’t a Clear Approvals task at the beginning of the new workflow that may be wiping out the previous counts.
I figured out how it’s happening - all approvals are meant to be done through workflow, but users have took it upon themselves to manually request approval through actions menu - the “Required” field is default to 1. I thought this was addititve (i.e. it would add whatever number required to the Approvals Required count), but it seems to reset it.
Do you by chance know if this is by design? Also, if I remove “Approve” right from a user, would that also stop them from using the Workflow User Approve task? Ideally I’d like to lock them out of the “ad-hoc” method of requesting approves
Ah, that’d definitely be the issue and one I have also had to design around. There is a Grant Permissions task and a Remove Ad Hoc Permissions task found in the Workflow Designer. These could be used in your workflow process instead of granting those permissions in the Security Class. This is becoming a standard for our implementations to better guide users through the workflow process we design for them.
The approval process available in the Actions menu is typically in place for a manual process in the absence of a workflow to automate these things.
Damn that’s going to be really annoying to change, we have a LOT of workflows and a lot of permission changes. Ugh.
Customer doesn’t like how such invoices don’t show up in their approvals request window, which is understandable. It’s wild that any user can go and change the required approvals of a document.
I don’t suppose there’s a permission(s) that will allow a person to approve via Workflow only, and not be able to use the ‘ad-hoc’ approvals?
I am not sure if I’m missing the point of having the Approvals options in Actions menu, but what’s the point of using approvals outside of a workflow if there’s no workflow to enforce it?
I’ve been chasing funky approvals issues for a while, and I think people doing it ad-hoc is messing them up.
I think I know what’s going in my next Ideas ticket hah. Thanks.