Framework for extending Approvals Hub to other applications (Technical Guidance)
The new Approvals Hub capability creates a unified approvals inbox that consolidates approvals from multiple external systems into the existing My Tasks view on Employee Center Pro.
In June 2023, ServiceNow released a new pre-built integration with SAP Concur for Approvals Hub. This integration also acts as a reference of the architectural framework customers and partners can use to build their own integrations with external systems to create a true unified approvals inbox on Employee Center Pro.
This article summarized the steps required to build new/custom integrations as per the recommended architecture framework, as followed in the pre-built concur integration.
Note: Approval Hub capability requires Employee Center Pro license and related Integration Hub Spoke of the external application.
Understanding the integration flow for Approval Hub
There are 3 entities or components of an integration required for Approval Hub:
- The external system: This is the application that you want to integrate with Employee Center Pro’s Approval Hub capabilities. This application must have APIs to extract approval and user data and share with ServiceNow. In the example used for this article, the external system is SAP Concur.
- Integration Hub Spoke for the external system: The integration hub spoke contains all the required actions to read/write data (for example- approval request, comments, approval result, etc.) into the external system. ServiceNow’s integration Hub has many pre-built Integration Hub Spoke. You must reuse and build upon them (if available for the external system you are integrating) instead of creating your own spokes from scratch. The pre-built concur integration uses the SAP Concur Spoke.
- Scoped application for the integration data and configurations: The scoped application contains the data sync logic with the Integration Hub spoke to ensure the right user and approval data is 1) synced with ServiceNow at a pre-determined schedule, 2) stored accurately, and 3) surfaced appropriately in the channels of choice.
See below for how these components come together (in case of the Concur integration):
As you think about the information flow, consider the kind of data, volume of data, and the APIs available to import the data from the external flow. Variations in these parameters may change how you design the integration operational flow.
Steps to integrate external systems of your choice with Approval Hub.
The pre-built concur integration can act as a model for building integrations to bring in approvals from other applications/systems in the organization into Employee Center Pro’s Approval Hub experience.
Below are the steps we took to build the concur integration, use them as your reference steps:
- Build or reuse the integration Hub spoke actions:
1.1 Scheduled job to sync users in Concur with ServiceNow – This is not needed if it is a read-only integration i.e. approvals are only shown on ServiceNow and fulfilled on the external system.
We need a custom flow here that will be responsible for fetching data from 3rd party system and inserting them in ServiceNow tables. Data transformation if necessary is also done prior to this insertion. Refer https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/utah-employee-service-management/page/product/human-resources/tas... for details on how to build such an integration layer.
1.2 Build Approve or Reject actions - Use the Action Designer to build custom actions to invoke your respective endpoints for approve & reject.
1.3 Pull Concur reports in ServiceNow system
2. Build the process flow for storing approval info within ServiceNow. To do this, you need to first identify the business process that needs to be followed. Before you start building anything, work with your process managers or workflow designers to document the complete, end-to-end process that must be followed for processing the approval within ServiceNow. Ensure you account for all the edge cases.
Below is the process flow we designed for the Concur integration for Approval Hub.
2.1 Create a new subflow (refer “Get concur reports”) to fetch reports from concur and create an Integration source record in table “sn_hr_integr_fw_source”.
Note: we are taking care of syncing users in same subflow “Get concur reports”. Else it needs to be taken care of separately as per requirement.
2.2 Create a Scheduled Job and execute the Integration source created above using script. (ref: “Pull concur reports”).
2.3 Create a table (ref: “Concur Sync Details”) to store date time and other details of sync, this datetime can be used in next sync to fetch reports modified after last datetime. Each time sync job runs, update the record in "Concur Sync Details" table with latest date time.
2.4 Create a staging table to pull reports from concur (ref. “Concur Expense Report Staging”) and store raw content. This will mostly have string type data fields since it stores data from APIs directly.
2.5 Create a table to store reports after transformation (ref. “Concur Expense Report”).
2.6 Create a transformation record in “Table Transform Map” table. (ref. “Concur Report Transform Map”).
2.7 Define field mapping and scripts to be executed pre and post (onBefore, onAfter) transformation. In onAfter transformation script put logic to create/update approval record in “Pulled Integration To-do” table.
3. Configure the display of approval records & corresponding actions. In this step, we will leverage the exiting Approval Hub configurations.
3.1 Create to-do configuration, task configuration, task-tab configurations, Action groups to be able to view the approval records on My task page on portal.
3.2 Create records in “To-dos Configuration” table for open and closed tab on My task page (ref. Concur Expense Report – Approval, Concur Expense Report – Completed). The “To-dos Configuration” records needs to be based on table where our approvals (“Pulled Integration To-do”) are stored.
3.3 Configure title row and details rows, which controls details in left side panel on My task page.
3.4 Create a “Task Configuration” (ref. “Approval | SAP Concur”) and configure columns for Common info, Primary info sections. Create an action group and link it to task configuration. This action group consists of Action, Action type records.
3.5 Create tab configurations inside Task Configuration, these tabs can use out of box functionalities or can use a custom widget to show data.
Refer to Approvals Hub FAQ's for additional details.
Hi @SmritiGupta ,
I am working on a custom integration between Sharepoint and approvals hub. I have question for you in the task configuration of the To-do.
I am trying to replicate the same config as available for Concur but however am unable to select my custom table in the reference table drop down. The only available options are Concur Expense Report, Knowledge, Risk Assessment.
Can you please let me know if am missing something.
Best Regards,
Harish M
