How can you do task auto approval in SharePoint Designer workflow after their respective due date

Question

I see a thread related here: Sharepoint Workflow - Conditional auto approval

One challenge I have that's different is that we are dealing with date context specific scenario. Here's what we want to do- Auto approve tasks when they are past due.

My initial though was that the default outcome feature of the task process does this but that's not what I'm seeing. Let me know if I missed something here.

Alternatively, I was hoping to add a logic somewhere in sharepoint designer that says if the due date is past today then approve the task automatically but couldn't really make this happen since a task process is a singular chunk of sequential process and I can't really add something "in the middle" of that. Is this doable? Are there alternative methods to achieve this?

Thanks for any guidance. This is for SharePoint 2013

Answer 1

Amal's response really pointed me in the right direction.

Couple lessons that are helpful in implementing his recommendation:

I found that a SP2013 WF can trigger a SP2010 WF but not another SP2013 WF. This means that the second WF on the task list needs to be a SP2010 WF is the task is generated by a SP2013 WF. This is due to the recursion feature: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sridhara/2014/08/19/fix-sharepoint-2013-workflow-recursion-prevention-part-1/

Though you probably already figured this out I found that %complete field needs to be set to 1 not 100.

Also default outcome is related to the content type. For the SP WF task content type set the outcome to "Approved" (This is what the Approved button does for default content type besides setting the task to complete and %complete to 1)

Lastly I found that a race condition can exist if the task is created and the due date has already expired. The task WF will still fire and auto complete the task, but if the source WF (WF that generated the task) has the condition checked to wait for all responses then it will not pickup that the task has been auto completed. To solve this I added a delay condition to wait for a couple min before executing the task auto approval WF.