Deeper documentation on workflow and approval

Hi Ron,

The best way to go beyond the docs is to post your questions here or via the support ticket system if you'd like to do so privately.

We have been focusing on building out net new features and enhancements and as a result the documentation has fallen behind. This is an area we hope to address over the next several months.

Thanks,
Matt

Regarding workflow, this is explained in details in our User Guide: http://www.rollbase.com/support.html#undefined

To use approvals process for your records, you'll need to install "Approvals" application from our Applications Directory. After that please follow these steps:

1. Plan your approval process
2. Mark one or more users as "Approvers" (use checkbox on User edit page. If you don't see it, use Page Designer).
3. Enable "Workflow" attribute on your object, such as Expense Report.
4. Enable "Approval" attribute on your object.
5. Configure "Expense Report Approval" action: sequence of approvers, select email template (edit template as needed), and type of approval process (sequential or parallel).
6. Assign "Expense Report Approval" action to one of workflow statuses (say, "Ready for Approval").

From that point as soon as particular Expense Report record is in "Ready for Approval" status, user with sufficient permissions can invoke "Expense Report Approval" action. That will trigger

Expanded version of Pavel's response:

The Approvals application installs sequential and parallel approval process capabilities into your account. Once installed, to enable approval capabilities for a given object, follow these steps:

1. First plan your approval process
2. Mark one or more users as "Approvers" (use the checkbox on the User edit page. If you don't see it, use the Page Editor to add that field to the User edit page).
3. Enable the "Workflow" attribute on your object.
4. Enable the "Approval" attribute on your object.
5. Create a Workflow Action for approving records. You will see a new type of action available when creating a Workflow Action that allows you to select: sequence of approvers, an email template (edit template as needed), and type of approval process (sequential or parallel).
6. Assign this new Workflow Action to one or more Workflow Statuses so users can start the approval process at appropriate stages in your workflow.

Now, as soon as a particular record is in the "Ready for Ap

Hi Sir Matt,



I hope you could answer my problem, it is clear that you could pre-define the sequence of approvers for a given object. But what if the sequence of approvers is to be determined by the user during the routing of the object during runtime? Alternatively, can I set the sequence dynamically depending on certain properties of the object? Like organizational grouping, area or date? I hope you could really help me Sir Matt... I think I might face "uncomfortable" consequence if I can't solve this :(

My context of user is non-admin users

Hi Camille,



As you know you can pre-define the sequence of approvers in a given approval workflow action. Rollbase currently has no other way to pre-define or automatically select approvers using other criteria.



Therefore, I recommend that you "Clone" the Approval workflow action for each set of circumstances. Then you can set Role-based, User-based and Relationship-based permissions to these actions.



In this way you can have different pre-defined list of default approvers for different users (by making different actions available to different users).



Hope this helps,

Matt

Hi Matt,



Thank you for your reply, but it seems that this would drastically increase our maintenance cost. There are 16 org group units and 6 object types each with unique workflow action requirement due to different approval sequence. Im really sorry to impose but don't we have another alternative?

Hi Camille,



No this is currently the only way to configure pre-defined list of approvals. If this is critical for you, can you escalate to Jeff Sia and Albert and have them confirm with us?



Also, it would be very useful if you proposed an enhancement and provided details on exactly how you need this to work. If we do add functionality to support this I want to make sure it is done in a way that works for you, applies to any customer, and is easily scalable/managable.



Thanks,

Matt

Hi Matt,



Thank you so much for your reply, I would escalate this to my supervisor and discuss this first internally. Again, thank you for your time and feedback.

Hi Matt, we are in the process of writing this up as well, we have a similar situation that has over 100 potential approvers and cannot clone the options, they need to be derived from the record relationships.

OK sounds like this is capability is in relative demand. Once we receive details from you both we'll review internally and get back to you with what we plan to do along with an ETA