Hi Patty,

Within the workflow, you can change the permissions by using Set Permission action. Change the permissions of the CreatedBy to Read.

Once you change the permissions, if the initiator of the workflow is same as Created By, workflow will not be able to make changes to the item that it is running upon. In this case you can run those update steps as workflow owner. Hope it helps.

ok i did that, now when it reaches the first approval and i want to respond to it goes to a blank screen. i restored my previous version and its still blank screen. i dont know what to do.

Hi Patty,

Have you customized the task notification? If yes, check the Approval link. You can use the Insert Reference for that. The blank screen will not come due to issues with permissions. If you are using Set Permissions, you are modifying the permissions of the item and not the Task. you should have contribute access on the task list to respond to the task. If you dont have permissions on the task, you should get Access Denied or "You are not allowed to respond to this task". Hope it helps.

so the first original issue i had was that we wanted to restrict the requester from editing the form after it was submitted. i did add the Set Permission action for this, but in doing that we now have a bigger issue of not being able to view the approval task form. i tried to restore a previous version that was working and we still cant see the task form.

when we click on the approval link from the email notification it opens it to a blank screen. if we try to respond to it from the Workflow Task page we get the same blank page.

we do see the item in there and that is pending manager approval. but its going  to a blank page we cant respond to.

there are no errors on this item or anywhere so we are unable to pin point the problem.

Did you remove the existing permissions when you set the permissions of the Created By to read only?  If so, you also need to make sure other people can continue to edit the item.

if your using nintex forms, you can add rules to the form,

if this form is opened as new mode or edit mode or display mode.

then disable/enable the forms as you need.

if you want to apply it on all the form, click on "select all" and add a rule so it applies on all controls at once.

hope this is what your looking for

My experience is that the "Form rule approach" mentioned by Ibrahim works easier as limiting access to the "CreatedBy Person" controlled by the "Set Permissions action"  immediately throws up issues and "blocks" the initiator of the Form to both Task and actual List Item to successfully complete the workflow. Also the "Set Permissions" action is relative slow to complete.