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TechNow Ep 9 | Extending Approvals

TechNow — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 16:10:11 GMT

Wouldn't it be nice to have a way to ask a requester for "More Information" or "Justification" without really approving or rejecting it? It would be so easy to just add an option to the workflow activity and tie it to a new state... Sorry, that feature doesn't exist (yet). Until it does, the guys will show you a simple way to get this functionality you want without a lot of work. Using a simple UI action, some basic workflow skills, an email template, and an inbound action, you can make your approval process more robust!

Originally recorded: Friday December 13, 2013 10AM ET

Featured Experts

Chuck Tomasi is a Platform Architect for ServiceNow. He is a computer science major with over 30 years of IT experience. As a former ServiceNow customer, Chuck won the first Innovation of the Year Award at Knowledge 10. Since joining ServiceNow in 2010 as a Technical Consultant, he has done many large scale ITSM implementations and custom applications, acted as an adjunct instructor for Education Services, created and lead the Technical Best Practices program, and co-hosts the ServiceNow series "TechNow".

Andrew Kincaid is a Sr. Software Engineer for ServiceNow. His extensive platform knowledge extends back to 2009 as a customer, Technical Consultant, and Developer.

Re: TechNow Ep 9 | Extending Approvals

Aaron40 — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 16:12:48 GMT

"Using a simple UI action, some basic workflow skills, an email template, and an inbound action, you can make your approval process more robust!" sweet!

I've been asked this a lot so I'm sure you'll get a lot of people to this webinar!

Re: TechNow Ep 9 | Extending Approvals

Stig Brandt2 — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 15:47:30 GMT

Nice example - just implemented conditionally approved

I conditionally approve your delivery, if this is done within this date.

Re: TechNow Ep 9 | Extending Approvals

Chuck Tomasi — Tue, 24 May 2016 00:02:01 GMT

FYI - it was brought to my attention today that there are some details missing and the workflow engine behavior may have changed since this video was made in late 2013. The workflow is pretty straight forward with the exception of the "Waitfor open" activity. The condition on that activity is simply "State | is | Open". The idea is that you sit back in "Pending" until the UI action "Request Approval" is clicked and the state moves forward to Open again, thus triggering the workflow to advance and retrigger the approvals. Well... it's not quite that simple anymore.

What we discovered this morning was that the workflow comes back to the approval, sees the "rejected" record and falls right through as a rejected request. Sadly, I don't still have the original source material for this video so I crafted a UI action shown below.

Name: Request approval

Active: true

Insert: true

Update: true

Condition: current.state == -5 && gs.hasRole('admin') && current.canWrite()

Script:

// Update previously rejected approval records to requested

if (current.approval == 'rejected') {

var app = new GlideRecord('sysapproval_approver');

app.addQuery('document_id', current.getValue('sys_id'));

app.query();

while (app.next()) {

app.state = 'requested';

app.update();

}

// Reset this back to approved

current.state = 1;

current.approval = 'requested';

current.update();

action.setRedirectURL(current);

Please let us know if you have additional questions or issues.

Re: TechNow Ep 9 | Extending Approvals

ramak — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 23:49:28 GMT

Thanks Chuck for redirecting me to this post, the UI action is working fine now. But, after the change is 'rejected' it is again going back to the 'requested' state. Please see the below workflow snapshot:

Your thoughts on the right conditions of the 'IF' statement above ?

This is the script I am using in the 'IF' condition :

answer = ifScript();

function ifScript() {

if (current.state.changesTo('-5') && current.approval.changesTo('rejected')) {

return 'yes';

}

return 'no';

}

Re: TechNow Ep 9 | Extending Approvals

Anshula Awasthi — Wed, 05 May 2021 09:51:21 GMT

Hi, I have done the same thing.

Put the condition if state is pending..

Re: TechNow Ep 9 | Extending Approvals

Anshula Awasthi — Wed, 05 May 2021 09:52:40 GMT

@Chuck Tomasi

Can you please tell what you have put in the if condition