Send approval email to user stored in variable on catalog / request item

[jfinn]

I am currently testing a file share request system for our service catalog.   As part of this, the user will select the file share that they require access to from a drop down list.   All of the file shares are stored in a module in the CMDB and have approvers listed for each file share.

Once you select the share from the drop down list, a catalog client script does a lookup and populates a field called 'Approver' with the users name.   (this is a reference field which looks up the value from the sys_user table)

What I need to do is automate an email directly from the workflow on the service catalog which will email the approver to seek approval for access to the file share.

Has anybody done anything similar lately and if so, how can you do this.   If possible, I would rather put the value into the "To" field on the email rather than the cc or bcc field.

I have had a look on here but have not been able to do this.   Anybody got any ideas if this is possible?

[Brad Tilton]

If this in an approval, you should probably be using an approval activity rather than a notification activity. Why aren't you using an approval?

[jfinn]

Hi,

We are building in an approvals mechanism whereby anybody can approve a certain type of request just by replying to an email sent by the workflow.   The outgoing email has two options on it, approve or deny.

When the user clicks on either of the two, it creates an email which they send back to Service-Now.   From there, an inbound rule picks up the email and sets the approval given field on the RITM to either Yes or No.   See below for screenshot of the inbound action.

We are doing it this way as a workaround as not all users who will need to approve currently have access to Service-Now so this is the best method we could come up with at this time.   However, I am relatively new to Service-Now so am open to suggestions if there are alternatives.

One other thing to note is that we do not have self-service enabled on our instance yet.

[Brad Tilton]

Ok that makes sense. The best practice with workflow notifications is to use an event activity and then fire a notification in the notification field from the activity. That allows you to manage all of your notifications in the same place. You can pass the user sys_id as one of the event parameters and then check the send to event parm1 checkbox.

[jfinn]

Hi Brad,

Many thanks for all your help and patience.   I assume your way is different to Kumar above.   Is your way a better way of doing this or just an alternative?   I have tried creating an event fired notification but have been unsuccessful so far.

I have been looking at the wiki and struggling to get it to work for me.   I am not sure exactly how I pass the sys_id through as an event parameter.   I am testing this now on a new workflow which has one variable called User_Name which is a reference from sys_user but am unable to get it to fire the email.

I would appreciate any assistance you can give on this.

[jfinn]

Below is my workflow:

Here is the event I have created:

And this is the error message that I get when I try to run this: