Ron,
I thought I would respond to this message with not really an answer to the
specific question you are asking
but more of a discussion of a general best practice model for using the
approval system.
Reading into your question, I am assuming you have a requirement where you want
to run an approval
process but when there is some specific criteria met, you don't want that
process to run.
I am going to suggest that you should approach the problem differently. This
different approach has many
advantages:
-- It is more consistent
-- It is more auditable and trackable (makes things like Sarbox compliance
reviews much easier)
-- It makes the overall flow of execution and processing much easier and
less error prone (one path of
execution not several)
This approach is a generic philosophy.
If there is a need for approvals, you ALWAYS call the approval process for
EVERYONE. This is regardless of
whether there are special conditions or limits or it is sometimes needed or
anything. You ALWAYS call
the approval process.
Then, you use the rules of the approval process to control action and operation.
So, let's look at your situation. You have a case where you want to have
approvals but to skip approvals
when the company is not Acme or when some group is specified. I am going to
suggest that you look at it
slightly differently.
You want approvals. When the company is not Acme or when some specific
group is specified, you want
the approval process to complete immediately with success without having a
person involved. If these
conditions are not met, you want to get explicit approvals.
The end result is the same, but it is much more managable and trackable to
think in the new terms (and it
is easy to do which is a nice bonus).
Within the approval process, there are a variety of rules you can configure.
One type of rule is an
Auto Approval rule. You can have any number of these rules for any process.
This type of rule is the first
type of rule run whenever an approval process starts and if the rule passes,
the approval process is
immediately approved, no individual approvals are needed, and the "done" or
completion rules are run to
update the process to move forward. If none of these rules are successfully
passed, then the approval
process continues on with other rules to assign things and go through the
process until that is approved
(or rejected) and then the completion rules are run.
So, in your case, you would just have the approval process called and you would
define one or more
Auto Approval rules that test the conditions you want to have the process
automatically approve with no
further action and you will be good to go.
Note that there are several other rules that can support you along the way:
Self Approval rules -- these are rules that run after the Auto approval
rules that are like Auto Approval but
more about including who you are and approving things based on you or
information about you. So,
you might have a Self Approval rule that approves if your personal
signature authority is over the limit of
the request being approved. Auto approval could have been used if it
was approve for ANYONE if the
request was under $10; but it could not have done something based on who
you are.
Get Authority (or Get Data) rules -- these are rules you can use that run
before the Self Approval rules to
get information you want to use in your later rules test. Essentially,
these are "Set Fields" type
operations that can pull data from other sources than the source ticket
(whose data fields are
available by default and without needing any work). For example, one
might be used to pull the
approval dollar authority limit for the requestor to test to see if they
have authority to self approve their
own request.
Anyway, the purpose of this note is not to teach the details of approval rules,
but to set out a
philosophy. Too many times, I hear requests for folks to try and figure out
how I can control whether or not to
call approvals or see how to change things so that approvals are called only
when or .... If you change your
thinking to say if there is a need under any condition for approvals, then call
approvals and put any rules or
restrictions or limitations or automatic approval or whatever within the
Approval process using all the rules and
capabilities of the approval server itself, you will find that you can much
more easily control what you are
trying to accomplish while also simplifying your processes, removing error
conditions in logic, and providing a
much better tracking method to ensure all is going correctly. In addition, you
can get much more
sophisticated about what conditions approve things. And, modification or
adjustment is now just adjusting
approval rules and not reconfiguring workflow.
So, my suggestion to solve your problem is to always let approval get called
and put your conditions
(actually the reverse of them because you want conditions that say to auto
approve not ones that say to
call approval) in Auto Approval rules and you will be good to go.
I hope this helps,
Doug Mueller
________________________________
From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList)
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ron Tavares
Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2011 8:13 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Using != and LIKE in Approval Mappings
**
Hi,
I think the answer to this is no, but I thought I would ask. Is there any way
to build an advanced qual in a Change Approval Mapping. Meaning, out of the
box:
For example:
Require Review Approval by Change Mgmt team when Requestor Group 'Company' !=
"Acme"
or
Require Review Approval by Change Mgmt team when Requestor Group 'Company' LIKE
"ABC%"
ARS 7.1
CM 7.0
Thanks,
.ron
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