Hi,
We are designing an approval workflow for user requests (authorization ítem).
Our client wants to have in all of the Authorizations views. one column showing the current approvers for that item (those who has pending tasks on that authorization). They don't want to view the task list as they want to work directly with the authorizations.
The workflow consists of the following steps:
1th) 15 approvers (parallel branches distributed among 3 different (sub)workflows)
2th) 1 approver
3th) 1 approver
4th) 1 approver
In order to be able to do that, we have created one field in the Authorization item which is 'multiple persons or groups' type. We were trying to have this field updated from the workflow, just before creating the tasks (for append the approver to that field) and after the task is completed (for removing that person of the field). With the sequential approvals there is no problem but we are thinking that this might bring us several problems in the parallel branches:
- What happens if two branches update the same item at the same time?
We also have tried to create another parallel branch for updating that field only once, but as the other parallel branches are distributed among 3 different subworkflows, it could also happen that the item update action runs before the subworkflows were even started (the timer doesn't start them inmediatly), so that field could be showing persons who don't have the task created yet. Would it be possible to run a parallel branch only after the other branches had alredy run? We were trying it with a repeat action for waiting until the subworkflow instances were available but it doesn't work. Other option would be update a variable inside each subworkflow (to indicate the workflow has started) and ask for those variables from the main workflow but we don't know how to query for the subworkflows variables from the main one.
Could you give us an approach to have that field available on the authorization list (with info updated)?
Here you have the approvals map needed for the ítem:
Thank you very much!