Recipient Groups behavior in Approval Form

[FranciscoAcuña]

Hello process automation experts,

I am working on a requirement for which I need to add an approval workflow to an existing custom development made with SAPUI5 and ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model on S/4HANA, and I'm considering using Build Process Automation for it. Although, a few questions arose when looking closer into the product's capabilities:

1. The approval form needs to be sent to multiple users, so that whoever sees it first can either approve or reject it, no majority voting is needed. I noticed SPA has a "recipient group" functionality, but I'm unsure about its standard behavior. Does the task gets completed for the other recipients in the group whenever one of them submits it? Or are we forced to use the Process Automation Workflow REST API to complete them via explicit API calls?
2. As for how the workflow receives the recipient groups. Can we send them as a part of the payload when calling on the workflow trigger API? Based on how the current app is designed, it would be ideal if we could trigger the workflow from the RAP based service, where we would have the logic to find the appropriate recipients, and then send their contact data over to the SPA workflow.

Looking forward to reading from you!

[Archana · Accepted solution]

Hello Francisco,

Here are the answers to your questions:

1. When you assign a Recipient Group to the user task in BPA, then the task is received in My Inbox / Task Center ( whichever inbox you have configured ) of all the users in that group. If some user want to work on it, then he / she can Claim the task ( note: Claim is a default button on the user task ). Once a user claims the task, it disappears from the inbox of others users of the group. Once claimed, the user can also Release the task without taking any action - and then the task appears back into all other user's inbox of the group.

If any user of the group, take action in the task like approve / reject etc. ( with or without claiming the task ) then the task is considered to be COMPLETED. There is no further action allowed and the workflow proceeds to next step of execution.

THERE ARE NO EXPLICIT API CALLS NEEDED if the user are taking actions from the Inbox.

2. Recipient group can be manually added while configuring the Form in the BPA, or can be selected from the process context. Based on your use case, you can - for example - call a action in the process which can fetch you the approvers groups or you can write a business rule / decision which can give the approvers group ( based on any criteria say region, amount, plant, organisation etc. ) - and then you can assign the outcome from these activity to the Form recipient group ( as shown in the screenshot below ).

If the approver group is fixed and not dynamic, then you can also send it with the initial payload when the process is triggered. Choice is yours based on the how the user groups can be determined in your case.

Hope that helps,
Archana

[Venkat_Vyza]

Hi daniel.wroblewski,

While reading the above detailed reply from archana.shukla, it reminded me one of your answers where you talked about creating the User Group on Identity Authentication Service and using that in the Recipient Groups of the Approval form.

Is that still relevant?

Thank you,

Venkat Vyza

[Archana]

Hello venkat_vyza ,

Creating role collection in BTP or creating groups in IAS is one way of defining user groups or distribution list. It depends on which user management system are being used in the organisation. There could be different ways to create and maintain distribution lists ( aka user groups). What I explained in my answer is how to add the user groups while configuring the Forms in BPA. To do so, user groups have to exist else during runtime the task will not be shown in any inboxes.

Hope that helps,
Archana

[Venkat_Vyza]

Thank you very much archana.shukla for the clarification.

You explained 5 different ways getting the Recipient Groups in the approval forms.

Regards,

Venkat Vyza

[Dinu]

Yes. It is a single approval. Process Automation does not even know how many are in the recipient group.

Guidelines for Specifying Recipient Users