Dynamic Hierarchical Approval Workflow 

Use

This Workflow Wizard creates a dynamic, hierarchical approval workflow. During execution of the Workflow Wizard you determine the type of the object to be approved and the approval task to be used for the approval.

You do not determine the extent of the approval procedure and the recipients approving at each level until the workflow is executed. When you do this you can assign a user, a position, a job, an organizational unit or a work center at each level. Once a recipient does not approve the object, the recipients higher in the hierarchy do not receive the object for approval.

Prerequisites

The object type of the objects to be approved must have an approval method and should also have a method for displaying the objects, which is defined as the default method. The Workflow Wizard can insert this default method into the approval step as a secondary method. All users who are to be able to carry out approvals in this workflow must be possible agents of the approval task.

Features

The workflow created by the Workflow Wizard has three parts:

  1. The users who are to approve the object are established.
  2. Each approver gets the opportunity to approve in turn in a loop. If someone rejects, the loop is ended and no further approvals are sought.
  3. The approval status is evaluated and the applicant has an opportunity to revise the object if it was rejected.

The workflow initiator establishes the approvers from the possible agents of the approval task. When the Workflow Wizard is executed you can specify whether the workflow initiator can be one of the approvers as well. When you choose the approvers you must ensure that the users who approve the object first are lowest in the hierarchy.

All approvers receive the object for approval in their respective Business Workplace in a loop. Once an approver does not approve the object, execution of the loop is aborted. If the object is approved, the approval status is changed.

The approval status is checked in the evaluation part of the workflow. Only once all approvals have been made is the approval result set to approved. The workflow initiator receives an e-mail stating that the object has been approved. Otherwise, the workflow initiator receives a work item in their Business Workplace. They must decide whether the object is to be revised or deleted. The approval result is set accordingly.

Activities

After execution of the Workflow Wizard you still have to add steps to the workflow, in which the object that is to be approved is created or established. This object must be available in the container element ApprovalObject .

When the Workflow Wizard is executed, the following container elements are created in the workflow container:

Description
(technical name)

Explanation

Approval object (ApprovalObject)

Reference to the object to be approved. The object to be approved and the approval task are determined when the Workflow Wizard is executed.

List of all possible agents ( AllAgents )

This element is no longer required.

List of selected agents ( ApprovalAgents )

The responsible agents of the approval task, who are selected by the workflow initiator from the possible agents of the approval task, are stored in this multiline container element.

Approval status ( ApprovalState )

The status is initialized at the number of approvers in a background step, and decreased by one with each approval.

If the status is zero on evaluation, the object was approved. If it is greater than zero, the object was rejected.

Table index ( Index )

This container element is used for index access to the table of selected agents.

Current agent (CurrentAgent)

The user who processes the work item is saved in this container element.

List of excluded agents ( ExcludedAgents )

The list of agents contains all users, positions, jobs, organizational units and work centers that have been involved in the approval process.

This list is used to exclude users who have already granted an approval from approving the same object again.

You can also include the workflow initiator in this list. This prevents applicants from being able to approve their own requests.

Rejection indicator
( RejectedFlag )

This indicator is set in the event of a rejection.

Approval result ( Result )

This field contains the result of the approval procedure after the evaluation part has been executed:

A for approved
D for delete
E for edit