Service Catalog - Request Approval vs Requested Item Approval

[thisismichaelb]

Still jumping into Service Catalog.   Not sure I understand the difference between the Request Approval and a Requested Item Approval.

Is the Request record/workflow where you will always capture the approval?   Or can you also capture the approval in the Requested Item record/workflow?

Also, every single Request record appears to go through the same "Service Catalog Request" workflow.   Since a Request record doesn't really have any defining characteristics (ie config item/request item/etc) - what condition would you build to trigger a different Request workflow?   Or you just build one "master" Service Catalog Request workflow?

The wiki is no help (where does it even define requests and what they are?) and I'm not sure this question was asked here yet.

[Fernando Dunn]

We turned off the Request approval engine and leave managerial approvals (if required) within the Requested Item workflows. I believe by turning off the engine, all Requests show as approved automatically. The reason we do this is that someone can have 30 different Requested Items on the same Request and each can be for a different person with a different manager.

[Makosko]

Fernando,

we did the same for the same reason as you. We can have 30 RITMs for 30 different people...In our case, the Requested for on the Request table is completely irrelevant. We have a few exceptions such as New Starter when only one Manager approval is required for everything a new starter needs to get going...In this case, I set a skip approval flag on RITM to true and no approval gets generated...

Cheers

[pathat]

Hello.

I have a similar situation where the user is getting an email indicating his request was approved. At first this was really confusing until I realized it's not referring to the requested item. My approval workflow for my custom catalog item has an approval stage where the manager has to approve and that's when I want the email to go out to the user.

How do I turn off the first workflow, that is to say the REQUEST workflow (versus the ITEM workflow)?

[Makosko]

are you looking to do your approvals on the RITM level ?

[pathat]

Hello Maros.

I find it quite confusing when approval email notifications mention both REQ and RITM. I want the approver to only need to approve one thing and that is the requested item. It looks like the REQ is auto-approved (I believe it's because there is no price associated with my catalog item, so it does not meet the $1000 requirement defined in the default REQ approval, correct?) but I found the email notification sent out to the requestor stating that his/her request had been approved, to be really confusing for the requestor!