Alternately Show Approval Group Name instead of individual Approvers on a specific workflow step

[kevin_philpot]

Is it possible to display the Approval Group Name instead of showing the specific approvers on a given workflow step? 

We have a few workflows where there are approval steps which technically are not managed by physical approvers, instead these are dummy approvers where we have a background process that will auto approve these request steps where needed.   Here is the approval chain:

• (Step 1) - Manager Approval
• (Step 2) - Business Unit Approval
• (Step 3) - Training Completed Approval - (Automated) 

For the Step 3 approval, we have a background process that runs periodically that is looking  for specific data and approving this step via an API call when appropriate.   In order for this to work we still had to assign a physical approver to step 3, even though they "technically) are not performing this review/approval function.    This all works fine, the only downside with this is that the actual approver name is displayed on the "My Requests" tab, where technically they are not reviewing and/or approving in the manual sense. 

Is there a way that we can display the "Approver Group Name" (or something else) instead of the specific approver name?       

[jdempsey]

First, if you haven't done so already, please open a support case and submit an enhancement request for the ability to selectively display approval group names instead of individual approvers.  This comes up from time to time (for different reasons), but I don't believe any of my customers has officially requested a product enhancement to enable this.  While we can't guarantee any enhancement request will be implemented, the more customers that request it, the more likely it is to get implemented.

Now, to answer your question, it is not possible to display the approval group name instead of the individual approver.  What I do in this situation is to use the App Portal service account as the approver for that step.  Alternatively, if you prefer, you could set up a separate user/mailbox with limited rights, specifically for that purpose.  Please note that during checkout, when the approval process is shown, it will display the approval group names with the individual approvers listed below each group, but when you view the list of approvals from My Requests, you'll see "Level 1"/"Level 2"/etc. with the individual approvers below each level (i.e. no mention of the approval group name).

It sounds like you already have the automation piece figured out, but for others who may be interested in doing similar things, I've attached a custom web service with a few sample SOAP web methods that can be used to figure out current approval group name and approval level, as well as to approve/reject/cancel a request, or start a deployment (when using the Start via API option on the catalog item).  To use it, just remove the .txt extension (it is an .asmx file) and copy it to the <appportal>\web\ws folder on your App Portal server.

[CharlesW]

We actually have an open enhancement for this.. The issue number for this enhancement is IOJ-1919560. No ETA as of yet.