Adding Dynamic Approval Assignment Selection to a Workflow

Question

This one might be a tad tricky with just SPD, but my hands are tied in terms of what I can/cannot use.

I've got to go and add the ability for a supervisor to go in on a workflow and say "These groups in this order" need to approve and comment on an item, and then assign a task to each of those people. As well, I need it to not continue on the workflow to the next group until each of those tasks is approved, but I need the ability to have the supervisor be able to move an item through a state.

A solution is to use a state machine workflow, but that requires the supervisor to manually move the item between stages, and they want it automated. So i need a sort of hybridized state machine & automatic workflow.

Requirements:
* Must use Sharepoint Designer to create the workflow.
* Must not use any external functionality (InfoPath, Customized Code, Visio, etc.) to create the workflow.

Is this even possible? So far I have not been able to find a solution for this, even on the TechNet forums.

Answer 1

I don't believe this is possible with out of the box SharePoint Designer. You are going to have to build out a custom workflow with Visual Studio.

Answer 2

Hmm, thinking broadly here, you could have a second list specifically for supervisors to add people/groups who need approve things. On your initial entry form, you could have an option of Custom Approval with yes/no as options and no being the default. If the user selects yes, with some jQuery you could redirect the user upon submission to the new form page of the custom approval list.

Then in your workflow, if the value is yes, you go into your custom approval steps for each of the specified users.

I don't knonw if you consider jQuery to be customized code in this sense as it's really only handling the form submission and redirection to the form on a specific case.