Flow designer - approval request to a specific person from specific department

[Ritesh17]

Hi team, I need help/advice with the Flow designer approval requests.

I have developed a Service Portal form which after submitting the form, depending on the form RequestedFor's Department, the Flow has to seek approval from the Department approver. The Department approver is not role specific. And Requestedfor and Department approver may or can be from different departments too.

Problem is that we have around 37 of those specific department approvers who belong to different departments. So if the RequestedFor belongs to department X, approval has to be from department X - approver. Depending on the Approval State - if approved I proceed further to create a Catalog task. If Rejected - I cancel the request.

I wrote up my Flow for this, but because there are many department approvers, and checking each approval state for each of those approvals led my Flow to have too many steps and Flow is very slow to run. Also I have come to a point where I cannot add any more actions to the Flow.

Is there any better way to do this other than having like 100 steps just for approval on my Flow?

[Muralidharan BS]

Hi Ritesh, 

How is the department approver defined, is it a field [dept head] on the department table? or do you have it on a specific table? 

If it is a field on the dept table you can easily dot walk to that field as an approver.

If not you can use decision tables to sort this issue, based on the "requested for" dept add a mapping to the respective approver.  

As the last option, you can use scripts in the "approval" action it to identify the approver and request one. 

Thanks

[Ritesh17]

Hi Murali,

Dpeartment approver is not defined on the table. There are specific users from each department who act as an approver.

I think the decision tables are availabe from SanDiego release correct? We havent upgraded to SanDiego yet.

Yeah i thought about using the script step as well and also wrote half of it before trying Flow. Even with the script, because of the nature of approval, the script has so many steps.

[OlaN]

Hi,

Decision tables are a core function within the platform, and has been around for a long time.

Decision builder is a new tool, to make building decision tables easier, and it's available from the Rome release.
It's available in the Store.
And here's a link to the release available on Rome.

[Muralidharan BS · Accepted solution]

Ok, decision tables would be the right choice in your case and involve no scripting, you can use them in Rome and the previous releases.