Hi ,

Please search the community and you will find various results for this. One of them is explained here.

Use a chain of managers in an approval process 

There's a number of ways of doing this.

If you know the approver is going to be the line manager of the initiator of the workflow each time, then you can use the Query User Profile, to query the profile of the initiator and find out the name of the Manager from AD (assuming AD is correct). Then store that user in a variable and set that variable as the approver.

Alternatively, if you were going to use role level approval, i.e. an expense claim >£50 goes to department director, >£100 Finance Director and >£250 goes to MD, then you could create a list to manage these roles.

Your list can contain a People field to identify the users account and a Title field to identify their role. Then in your approval workflow use conditions to identify the value of the claim, for example £150. In this case your first condition would identify that the claim is worth more than £100 but less than £250 and the route that it would follow would lead it to a Query List action configured to identify the Finance Director from the list.

The reason I would put your approvers in a separate "managed" list, is to allow you to swap approvers in roles easily without having to edit the workflow and republish it, and also it's very extensible, if you have many approvers.

I've had to do this before and I did it with a managed list as ‌ recommended. There have been many times when people had to be switched around (due to vacations, travel, etc.) in the list and it was very easy.

Doing it this way also prevents workflow modification.

Hi Walter, have you solved it?

(reference for me fhunthreview )

Well, I have been trying to get my workflow fixed but so far I am having some issues, I do not have many experience but I have followed all the process step by step and I cannot solve the problem.

I have the following errors:

Workflow Status

2) And also the Query LDAP is not working "(&(objectClass=user)(samaccountname={WorkflowVariable:Current Approver}"

I tried with parentheses )) by the end of the instruction but nothing happen.

Well, I have been trying to get my workflow fixed but so far I am having some issues, I do not have many experience but I have followed all the process step by step and I cannot solve the problem.

I have the following errors:

Workflow Status

2) And also the Query LDAP is not working "(&(objectClass=user)(samaccountname={WorkflowVariable:Current Approver}"

I tried with parentheses )) by the end of the instruction but nothing happen.

You shouldn't need to do this. Are you querying a list? If so, as long as your list column is a People/Group column and your variable you are saving the user into is a people column, you should be able to use this variable directly in your task.

If you are looking for a Manager, then you want to use the Query User Profile, and again, store the Manager field in a People variable.

Awesome, I tried and now it is working, Thank you so much Ryan.... 

‌ can you mark the answer as correct to close out the thread please?

Good day Walter,

I just use the following and I get all the information that I require.  (Samaccountname={ItemProperty:Title})

It also looks like you are doing the Run Now option in the last screen.  You have to replace your current approver variable with an actual test value when using the Run now option, i.e. (SamAccountName=JoeBloggs).  When you run the workflow through the normal execution it will pick up the value of the variable but not in the Run Now option.

Kind regards,