Copying Comments and Work Notes between Tasks, Approval, etc.

[Jack42]

Dear Community Members,

I'm shipwrecking on supposably simple tasks.

 

At Begin the Requester fills in data in a form of a service catalog item and submits it ① to an Approver.

1. challenge - Set an initial Comment in the approval request for the Approver in Ⓐ.
I've found a working solution here, but it looks to me like a workaround.. is there a better way to add a comment?

2. challenge - Set a Short Description, so the Approver can easily see what the request is about
In "My Approvals" under "Self-Service" the field Short Description is not available.
If I create a report myself, I can choose "Approval for.Short Description", however the field displays their content for users with an admin role only, not for approver_user role.
It seems to be connected to the roles, can I set the visibility of field content in a report somewhere?

After the submission ①, the Approver reviews the form in Ⓐ, in case she/he rejects, it is mandatory to write a Comment with the reason.

3. challenge - Copying ② the Approvers Comment in Ⓐ to the Task Ⓑ
I've found a working solution for this, too. However it seem to work on first reject only.
If the Requester updates the form in Task Ⓑ and sends it back ③ to the Approver and she/he rejects it again in Ⓐ, the above mentioned script does NOT copies the Approvers Comments anymore.

4. challenge - Copying ③ the Requesters Work Notes in Ⓑ for the Approver in Ⓐ
Somehow I'm not able to copy/forward the Work Notes made in Ⓑ back to the Approver in Ⓐ. I tried the same approach as I used for way ①, however I cannot get the Work Notes from Task Ⓑ to copy it into Ⓐ.

Last but not least, in case the Approver in Ⓐ finally approves, a team in Ⓒ will get ④ the Task to round-up the form data. In case that's not possible, they will cancel the task (here as well, it's mandatory to write the reason in the Work Notes), which routes ⑤ it back to the Requester in Ⓑ.

5. challenge - Copying ⑤ the teams Work Notes in Ⓒ to the Task Ⓑ
This seems to be a simple copy from Task to Task, but I cannot get it working.

I already spent some days reading this board, researching through the SN Doc Library, and doing a lot of trial and error (error in particular).

Hopefully my approach is understandable, it would be very much appreciated, if someone could help me out.

Many thanks in advance,
Jack

[Dave Smith1]

To address your (pretty comprehensive) questions:

1. It's possible to use a business rule that pre-populates the comment field.  However, what would be the objective here - to inform the user what the approval is about?
2. Check ACLs to see if visibility is restricted; it's fairly simple to add a new rule permitting visibility for those with the approver_user role AND they're the nominated approver (preventing approvers from seeing other approval requests).  Again, if the purpose is to lend information to the approval request, then perhaps details of the related catalog item request should be displayed on the approval.
3. Do you actually need to copy the data to another field, or simply expose this on the task?  It sounds like your end objective here is to display the reasons for the approval/rejection - i.e.: show related information between records.
4. Again, not sure what the purpose of copying is here - if it's information exposure you're after, look at ways of dot-walking to (then displaying) related information, rather than duplicating it in several places.  Try to maintain the "single system of record" philosophy here.
5. For copying, see what's been written earlier.

At a glance, it sounds like your overall objective is to ensure stakeholders are exposed to information captured at different process stages and held in different tables, and your solution revolves around copying information from one record to another - simply for display purposes.  Is that right?

[Jack42]

Thank you Dave for your fast reply.

At a glance your right. The workflow above is the simplified version of the initiation of a New Hire process. I've 3 stakeholders in this phase, a Requester (the departments), an Approver (a manager), and a Team for the data round-up (part of operations) before the "real work" starts.

The approach is to provide each stakeholder a history of relevant Comments/Work Notes to make sure they know why the request got rejected or to receive additional information for that case.

1. Yes, the objective is to briefly inform about what to do in the Comments.. like: "New User Request for John Doe. Please verify the application."
2. ACLs.. oh dear.. that's thousands.. don't even know where to start.. "short_description" doesn't return a hit. I just want to write: "New User", "User Transfer", "User Deletion", etc. in the Short Description, so the Approver can see what type of approval it is already in the report or under My Approvals without opening it.
3. Here I need a way to display the Comments from the Approver (who rejected) to the Requester, like: "Please add office room number.", so the Requester knows the reason for the rejection and can adjust the data in the form accordingly.
4. Like 3. just this time it's the Work Notes from the Requester (who adjusted the data in the application form) which needs to be displayed for the Approver, like: "Added the room number".
5. see above..

I really like the sound of that "single system of record" philosophy, however I seem to fail in dot-walking the journal data.

[Ct111]

Hi Jack,

I am working on solution will revert back to you .

But, need to know have you given a thought about using RunScript in between your Approvals to set

comments and worknotes in Task or Requests. I think you should give a try.

PLEASE mark my answer as CORRECT if it served your purpose.

[Jack42]

Many thanks in advance creativethinker, looking forward to your reply.

I tried RunScript in different ways, proposed by other members in other discussions in this board. I cannot say that I didn't do it the wrong way, but none of it seemed to work.. if you could give me an example, that would be great.