How to Disable Approval Workflow When Editing List Item

Question

I have a list which users are able to submit new contacts to, but these contacts need approval before they can be accessed by everyone.

In order to achieve this, I went to :

List -> List Settings -> Versioning Settings :

As you can see, I selected No for Create a version each time you edit an item in this list?, however whenever a list item is edited on this list (after being created and then approved), it goes back to being in a Pending state and requires further approval.

This then causes an infinite chain reaction where, if an item is approved after an edit, this approval counts as editing the item and so the document goes back into Pending state.

Is there a way of preventing this? Ie I would like to require approval on Create but not on Edit, and I also need another workflow which I created to run each time an item is edited.

Answer 1

You can check if condition for the approval block with the workflow status hidden field.

• Create on hidden column called IsApproved & give default value as No
• At the time of new item creation inside the approval block, Update the IsApproved field as Yes
• In the workflow check if IsApproved equal to false then go to approval Please refer the below image

Or else you dont want to trigger the workflow for edit list item at all. You can uncheck the Start workflow automatically when the item is Changed in the Start Options of workflow settings.

Answer 2

How about creating a column, maybe call it newWF as a (single line of text) and set to default value to Yes.

in your wf, check the value of that column, if it is equal yes(meaning it is a new item), run your logic, but dont forget to set the column to No after you finish.

if the value is no do nothing or skip.

not the most elegant solution, but it works!

Answer 3

at least for my situation I found a workaround. It consists in applying an action at the very end of my status change workflow of ¨set content approval¨ and I just assign approved. This makes my list item to automatically go back to approved again when somebedy changes the status of the ticket.