Restart workflow, how does it affect existing approvals

[tahnalos]

Trying to simplify a complex workflow in which it was suggested that at certain points if certain conditions are met, the workflow restarts itself to proceed through the process again.   While this is of interest to me as it would certainly make the workflow easier to maintain, I'm worried about two particular scenarios that I would like some input for.

1) Does this mean that ALL approvals are reset and therefore have to be reprocessed?   This issue is of particular annoyance as if a group has already approved the change (we have 4 separate approval levels), they do not want to be flagged for approvals again under certain circumstances.

2) We use certain scratchpad fields to gather statistics on the decision making that the workflow uses and only apply the fields to the change forms only after final approval is given.   Are these scratchpad variables reset when the workflow itself is reset?

Thanks

[Michael Fry1]

There is an out of the box inactive business rule named SNC Approval - Reset conditions that you should review. Based on some criteria (under checkResetConditions) such as type changing or whatever, the business rule will restart the workflow. However, there are 3 possibly options for handling approvals:

1. Mark all existing approvals for the change as 'cancelled' and restart the workflow to create new approvals

2. Delete all of the existing approvals for the change and restart the workflow to create new approvals

3. Leave the approvals for the change in their current state and restart the workflow.

The BR has instructions on how the BR works and the options. Check it out, might answer some questions.

[tahnalos]

Thanks, Michael.   The option to cancel/delete approvals is attractive enough, but doesn't handle the case when the workflow would be restarted because the approval groups are changed.   Is there a way to "selectively" choose which approvals to keep and which ones to discard?

[Michael Fry1]

Not that I'm aware of, but if you look at the last option in the business rule script, if (comment) - maybe you can use something like that to retain certain ones. If marked as keep or comment contains keep - the problem I see if you keep some and the workflow resets and pulls in duplicates, then what?