Flow Designer

[kirankr2061]

I am using flow designer for automating my process now I have a situation I am using reference catalog variable and dot walking through it and asking for approval, but the problem is in table all the email of users are stored in string fields and how can I do scripting for approval in flow designer so that I need to extract email and query it in sys_user table and send approvals.

No scripting available for Approval activity 

To the owners string field, I need to send approval

How can I achieve this?

[anshul_goyal · Accepted solution]

Hello @kirankr2061,

Since Flow Designer's "Ask for Approval" action requires user references, but you're working with email addresses stored as strings, you'll need to convert those emails into user records dynamically. To do this, create a Custom Action that takes the owner string field as an input, processes the email addresses, queries the sys_user table, and pushes the valid user records into an array. Set this array as the output of your custom action. Then, place this custom action right before the "Ask for Approval" step in your flow, and use the output array from the custom action as the input for the approvers in the approval step.

Use below script in the custom action:

(function execute(inputs, outputs) {
    var emails = inputs.emailString.split(','); // assume comma-separated
    var approvers = [];

    emails.forEach(function(email) {
        email = email.trim();
        var userGR = new GlideRecord('sys_user');
        userGR.addQuery('email', email);
        userGR.query();

        if (userGR.next()) {
            approvers.push(userGR.getUniqueValue()); // push sys_id
        }
    });

    outputs.approverList = approvers; // return array of sys_ids
})(inputs, outputs);

Please mark my solution as helpful and accepted for future reference.

Thanks

[Mark Manders]

Approvals are set to users or groups, so you need to query to the user/group table to find the correct ones.
If your field only contains string values, you will need to add a step before the approval step to get the email addresses from the owners field and use those to find the user records that you can then use in your approval step.
You can't create approval records for string values.

[anshul_goyal · Accepted solution]

Hello @kirankr2061,

Since Flow Designer's "Ask for Approval" action requires user references, but you're working with email addresses stored as strings, you'll need to convert those emails into user records dynamically. To do this, create a Custom Action that takes the owner string field as an input, processes the email addresses, queries the sys_user table, and pushes the valid user records into an array. Set this array as the output of your custom action. Then, place this custom action right before the "Ask for Approval" step in your flow, and use the output array from the custom action as the input for the approvers in the approval step.

Use below script in the custom action:

(function execute(inputs, outputs) {
    var emails = inputs.emailString.split(','); // assume comma-separated
    var approvers = [];

    emails.forEach(function(email) {
        email = email.trim();
        var userGR = new GlideRecord('sys_user');
        userGR.addQuery('email', email);
        userGR.query();

        if (userGR.next()) {
            approvers.push(userGR.getUniqueValue()); // push sys_id
        }
    });

    outputs.approverList = approvers; // return array of sys_ids
})(inputs, outputs);

Please mark my solution as helpful and accepted for future reference.

Thanks

[Ankur Bawiskar]

@kirankr2061 

you can use flow variable, query and store user/group sysId in that and then use that flow variable in Ask for Approval

also check this blog on how to use scripted approvals

Scripted Approvals in Flow Designer with Flow Variables 

If my response helped please mark it correct and close the thread so that it benefits future readers.

[Ankur Bawiskar]

@kirankr2061 

Thank you for marking my response as helpful.

As per new community feature you can mark multiple responses as correct.

If my response helped please mark it correct as well so that it benefits future readers.