Solved: Approvals - auto approve and default search dates

TeriStevenson · ‎Jul 24, 2019

As a background we use App Portal to review new software for the company and have a 7 level approval workflow. Most of the time when an approvers gets the request for approval email, they click on View or Approve and because the default search only goes 30 days prior, they get confused and think they have nothing to approve. Some requests are 90 days old. Is there a way to set the search criteria Filter By Date From: to 60 or 90 days?
or any way to bring up the request to approve it without having to reset the search criteria? It's been confusing for the approvers.

Another question I get asked a lot is why the Auto Approve link approves, but there isn't any message in the Approve/Reject tab to indicate to them that the approval was successful.

Wondering if other people have these issues with their approvers and how you've worked around it.

CharlesW · ‎Jul 29, 2019

Teri,
Both of these are common questions... First, there is no way at this time to change the date range on the date picker under approve/reject. The start date is hard coded to be 30 days from the current date. Likewise, there would be no way to notify the approver that the request was approved when selecting the "auto approve" link.. About the only thing that I might suggest would be to disable the links which App Portal adds to the approval email.. To do this, you would set a property in the DB, and restart the ESD Service.. To set this property run the following query:

update wd_appsettings set value = 'False' where KeyName = 'ShowHyperlinkForApproverEmail'

You can then add whatever you want to the approval notification . For example, you might provide a direct link only to approve/reject page(http://<server>/esd/MyRequests.aspx?Show=pending).

Try it out to see if it is better or worse for you.

View solution in original post

CharlesW · ‎Jul 29, 2019

Teri,
Both of these are common questions... First, there is no way at this time to change the date range on the date picker under approve/reject. The start date is hard coded to be 30 days from the current date. Likewise, there would be no way to notify the approver that the request was approved when selecting the "auto approve" link.. About the only thing that I might suggest would be to disable the links which App Portal adds to the approval email.. To do this, you would set a property in the DB, and restart the ESD Service.. To set this property run the following query:

update wd_appsettings set value = 'False' where KeyName = 'ShowHyperlinkForApproverEmail'

You can then add whatever you want to the approval notification . For example, you might provide a direct link only to approve/reject page(http://<server>/esd/MyRequests.aspx?Show=pending).

Try it out to see if it is better or worse for you.

TeriStevenson · ‎Jul 29, 2019

Thank you Charles. This is what I suspected. I'm going to remove the AutoApprove portion and add a link to a job aid for the approvers that they can refer to.