How to mimic the \Add or Update Approvers\" functionality available in SharePoint out of the box approval workflow?"

  • 10 December 2015
  • 3 replies
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I am using Nintex Workflow 2013 with Nintex Forms 2013.  My users are accustomed to using the out of the box SharePoint workflows in our Moss 2007 environment and they rely heavily on the "Request a Change" and "Add or Update Approvers" functionality.  I have rewritten their solutions using Nintex forms and workflow and I was able to provide the "Request a Chagne" functionality by creating a state machine workflow.  They are now requesting the ability to Add or Update approvers while the workflow is in progress and I have not been able to figure out how to do that.

 

There are several approvers that I pull from a lookup list and the tasks are assigned one at a time by using a foreach loop.  How can I provide the ability for them to change (add or remove) the approvers once the foreach loop has already started?


3 replies

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Susan,

Yikes this looks like a really big process that will only get bigger and bigger. 

The state machine may be great for this, but can be buggy if you never get out of the workflow by essentially ending the states. I would ask why are they wanting to add or remove approvers within the same workflow?  Could you use a simple workflow that assigns a task to the person that is selected.  Then based on the start form they could add the approvers name and it then generates a tasks for them? 

This simpler workflow could act as a adhoc assignment workflow to relieve the need to loop through, etc.  Does that help?

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It is a purchase approval and they have a default set of approvers for each purchaser(such as the purchasers direct supervisor, section chief, etc.).  The workflow is set to kick off once they create a new item in the list.  The reason for wanting to modify the approvers in the middle of the workflow is because sometimes a purchaser will make a purchase for another section and in that case they do not need the purchasers' supervisor approval but the approval of someone in the other section.  With the add/update functionality that is available out of the box they can just remove the wrong approvers and add the correct ones without having to cancel and start a new one.

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Susan,

Thanks for the extra information.  My recommendation would be to make an approval process that runs specific to a particular step.  For example:

Initial request comes in and because its from User A it automatically gets assigned to Mr. A based on logic in the workflow for sections.to approve.  The next step is for Mr. A to review and approve.  If he sees that it should go to a different section he can update the item with the appropriate section and then the next approver would get notified based on the correct section.  So in this sense rejecting the request and adding the correct section could achieve what you need by putting in the appropriate approver.

The workflow would simply handle an approver based on the section and assign a task to the approver.  It would also need an update status option to control the overall approval processes of the item, and you may want to have versioning turned on to show the history of approvals.  If you want everything stored as metadata and each purchase requires say three levels of approvals, then I would create approval 1 and approver 1, approval 2 and approver 2 and so on.  By doing this, the user inputs the approver to send it to next, and the workflow simply handles the process. 

Does that help.

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