Preventing Knowledge Article Approval Requests being created for/issued to ownership group members

John Green2 · ‎01-20-2022

As part of our knowledge management, we make use of ownership groups - so, many of our articles are associated with an ownership group. We have our article workflow set to 'Instant Publish' on the relevant knowledge bases. We are finding, however, that when an article is submitted, every member of the related ownership group is getting issued with an approval request/approval request notification. Does anyone know of a way to prevent such approval requests from being created?
Thanks.

John Green2 · ‎01-27-2022

It turns out that, on the '...Knowledge - Approval Publish' workflow, the 'If condition matches' field (under the 'Conditions' tab in the workflow properties) had been set to 'Run the workflow always', which meant that the '...Approval Publish' workflow executed on every insertion into the kb_knowledge table, regardless of the workflow setting on the containing knowledgebase.

View solution in original post

Weird · ‎01-21-2022

Are you sure you're using the instant publish workflow?
It shouldn't have any approval notifications.

If it's modified then it might, but the "Knowledge - Approval Publish" workflow is actually generating approvals.

Also, if you go to the email logs and open one of the approval emails, you should see a notification attached to it:

With that you can check the condition for triggering the notification. If it's an event, it is probably triggered by a workflow, but depending on the customization it could also be a BR on the kb_knowledge table.

John Green2 · ‎01-21-2022

Thanks Joni for your reply. We are definitely using instant publish workflow (unmodified), and the notification is being triggered by the approval record itself (aysapproval_approver) being inserted. And as mentioned, an approval is generated for each member of the ownership group referenced from the article. So, it does appear that there's some OOTB functionality behind this behavior, and I'm ideally looking for an OOTB way of disabling it. Any ideas?

Weird · ‎01-24-2022

That does sound weird.

I don't currently have anything with an example, but I do know that the property "glide.knowman.ownership_group.allow_self_approval" is associated with ownership group approvals. However I'm not sure if setting that to false will completely drop the approvals, but you could give it a try.

John Green2 · ‎01-24-2022

I did try switching the "glide.knowman.ownership_group.allow_self_approval" property value, but it didn't make any difference. I'll contact Support and see how far I get. Thanks again Joni for your response.