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I have the need to create a workflow that will begin when a user submits an infopath form to a document library. Some fields will be extracted from this form to build the workflow.

Steps:

Notify the form submitter's manager and request that they approve or disapprove.

One or more other users will be notified and requested to approve or disapprove the submitted form. If any of them reject the form, the original requester should be notified and requested to re-submit the form.

I can make a workflow for step 1 and then check the value of that field in the task to see if it's either approved or disapproved before moving onto the next step or not.

The issue I'm having is how to check whether someone has rejected or approved in the 2nd step, since there could be multiple users.

Any help is greatly appreciated

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2 Answers 2

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The second review, does it take place within the form or is it a task in a task list? If it is within the form, then wait for a field to be "rejected". If you are doing it as a repeating field so that multiple people can enter, then you can concatenate that field into a hidden field within the form and promote this concatenated field out to your form library as a column, then if that column contains "reject" send it back to the user.

If you are doing it as tasks, then you should have multiple created and wait for all of them to be complete, then check to see if any one of those is "rejected" and then send the notification back to the user.

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  • Thanks for your response Lori. I'm doing this as workflow steps. I didn't know there was any way to do it within the form. Is there a way to do it on the form in that the requester submits it, his/her manager gets notified and then the manager can select "approved" or "rejected" from a control on the form and then the same for other people that need to approve the form? If I do them as tasks, I can't figure how to check multiple tasks. Like, if I have one person, I can check the value of their task, but if it's multiple, how can I iterate through them?
    – Music Magi
    Commented May 20, 2011 at 15:25
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    Yes, you can absolutely do this all from within the form. The workflow then just sends the notifications as links to the appropriate people. Create sections within the form that are hidden by conditional formatting until they are ready for approval, then have them appear after submission (usually easiest to have the submit button also populate a field with a value such as submitted and then have the approval section appear when that is no longer blank). You can then set the workflow to wait for the approval and then go to the next step.
    – Lori
    Commented May 20, 2011 at 16:26
  • Thanks a lot Lori - I am going to try this different approach.
    – Music Magi
    Commented May 20, 2011 at 16:40
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If this is a custom SharePoint Designer workflow with an Approval Process action, then when the user adds the workflow to the library, the association form will include an End on First Rejection check box that will automatically reject the document if it is rejected by any participant.

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  • This is a custom sharepoint design workflow, but I'm using version 2007 and I don't see any option for approval process in the actions. This sounds like it would be very helpful in my scenario, though
    – Music Magi
    Commented May 20, 2011 at 16:40

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