Approval Reroute If Manager is Blank

[jlaps]

We use a MANAGER approval on almost all request forms that gets assigned based on the requested_for.manager reference field that is populated from our LDAP sync. We do have situations where user accounts that are not housed in our HR system, may not have a manager denoted, and this field is blank in ServiceNow. When our workflow activity hits these users, the MANAGER APPROVAL fails to generate and just gets skipped in the workflow as if it occurred.

Is there a clever way to "fix" this without having to update every MANAGER approval activity in every workflow? We can add complexity to the current approval activity where it checks for a null MANAGER, and if null, default to some other group approval sysid, but this would require all the workflows getting updated which would be difficult.

Is there any way to fix this when the approval actual tries to generate? Thinking probably not since the approval fails to create when this is null.  The root cause here is that we have more than one Microsoft Domain that we sync accounts from, and some users have managers from the 'other' domain. We can link these in Azure, but the LDAP sync cannot handle the SID references that make this work, so the manager fields syncs across blank for these users.

[Tony Chatfield1]

Hi, OOB the expected behaviourt is that an approval will skip if there is no valid approver, if it did not the approval workflow (not sure about flow) would be unable to progress and would need to be cleaned up via script or deletion.

I would use an approval workflow or flow, and test the content of the manager field before moving to the approval activities.