Designing an approval process

As with the Collect information steps, Ren's routing choices for an approval step are:

• Specific user
• Work queue
• Use business logic

To design the approval process, Ren selects Specific user for both the Approve content and Approve request steps.

To route work for the Approve content step, Ren does the following:

1. Click the Approve content step to open the contextual properties pane on the right.
2. On the General tab, under the Route to section, enter the following information into the fields:
   • Specific user
   • User name
   • Gab@abctech

Ren follows similar steps for the Approve request step:

1. Click the Approve request step to open the contextual properties pane.
2. Under the Route to section, enter the following information into the fields:
   • Specific user
   • Participant
   • Owner

In a Pega application, the Owner is defined as the individual that first initiated the case. For Ren's Content Request case type, the Owner and the Requester are the same.

Ren must activate the Owner participant profile for the application to work properly. To do this, Ren completes the following steps:

1. In the Content Request case life cycle window, click the Settings tab.
   
    
2. In the menu that is displayed, select Participants.
3. Click Owner.
4. Select the Create participant automatically when the case starts check box.
5. Click Add.
6. Click the Workflow tab to return to the Content Request case life cycle window.
7. In the Content Request case life cycle window, click Save.

Next, Ren configures the views for each approval step.

 In Ren's application the views for both the supervisor and requester approval steps will be similar.

The Approve content step will contain a single new field called Supervisor review.

Ren completes the following steps to create the view:

1. Click the Approve content step to open the contextual properties pane.
2. On the General tab, click Configure view.
3. Click the Trash icon to delete the Notes field.
4. Click +Add.
5. Click Fields.
6. Click Create new field.
7. In the Name field, enter Supervisor review.
8. In the Type list, select Text (paragraph)
9. Click Submit for the field.

Ren adds fields for the Completed project and the Project notes (Edit mode: Read-only), and then clicks Submit to save the view.

Ren repeats the steps above to create a similar view for the Approve request step, adding the Requester review field. He also adds fields for the Completed project, Project notes (Edit mode: Read-only), and Supervisor Review (Edit mode: Read-only), and then clicks Submit to save the view. 

Ren and Gab have decided to enable approval for both email and mobile devices. This allows the case to be approved or rejected outside of the Pega application and the Web Portal.

In both cases, the user specified in the routing will receive a notification via email, text, or both, as in this case. The user will be able to access the project and process the approval or rejection from within the notification.

To configure the functionality for the Approve content step, Ren completes the following steps:

1. Click on the Approve content step to open the contextual property pane.
2. On the General tab, in the Enable approval from section, select both the Email and Mobile check boxes.
3. Ren has decided to use the default templates for both the Email subject/Push notification messages and the Email Content sections, so no changes need to be made to these settings.
4. Select the Included attachments check box.
5. Select the All case attachments radio button. 
6. Click Save.

Ren follows the same steps to configure email and mobile notifications for the Approve request step. 

In the following image, drag the center handle to see how the Approve request step is configured, and how it is displayed in the web portal: 

In your own Pega environment, configure an approval process. You can mirror Ren’s application, or configure the approval process for your own situation.