SharePoint Workflow - Approval Task - Selecting approver from a look-up field's list

Question

Now, first of all I apologise for the title; it wasn't the easiest request to word. I've had a look around, and although there's several queries around approval tasks, I can't actually find one that encompasses the same circumstances as the ones I've listed - nor the same requirements.

I've built approval workflows in the past for SharePoint lists without difficulty - however all of my SharePoint knowledge I've picked up purely from working with the system and it's designer tool - so I'm not expert.

In this case though I've hit a bit of a wall. I'm building a list that'll handle our company's timesheet submissions. In it, they are allowed to submit a timesheet that can contain up to five separate items for different projects they've worked on. Fields are as follows:

• Project Code
• Hours Worked
• Overtime Hours Worked

These fields are replicated for the additional four rows.

Now, my problem is that the 'Project Code' field is a look-up from another list - and in that list, each project code item has another field named 'Project Owner', which of course has the project owner's name in. What I'm looking to do, is start a parallel approval task with the project owner of each project selected in my submission; however I'm unsure on how to reference the field required.

I've not really dabbled with any coding when it comes to workflows. I have experience with C#, C++ and a bunch of linux shell languages, so if anyone can point me in the right direction if further customisation is required that cannot be achieved via. the designer, that'd be great.

Thanks.

Answer 1

This can be done a bit easily with a Visual Studio Workflow or if you have SharePoint Designer, with a SPD workflow. Another suggestion is add the Project Owner column too with the lookup. You can add many columns from that list to this list when you are creating a lookup. So you do not have to refer multiple lists in your workflow.

Now create a Sequential workflow using Visual Studio. This will be a list workflow that will fire when a new item is created. You can add a 'Create Task' action to the workflow and assign it to the person in the Project Manager field which was taken from the lookup.

A workflow need a task list and a history list. We use history list to frequently log the action status as things can be recovered logically if we have the tracking. Task list is for creating task and assigning to the people. In your case, the project owner. You can also send task notifications emails each time a task is assigned to a project manager.

Then provide a list view which shows the not completed task to each project manager. This will be a list view webpart, which is filtered by [Me].