Designing an approval process

As with the Collect information steps, Ren's routing choices for an approval step are:

• Specific user
• Work queue
• Use business logic

To design the approval process, Ren selects Specific user for both the Supervisor Approval and Requester Approval steps.

To route work for the Supervisor Approval step, Ren does the following:

1. Click the Supervisor Approval step to open the contextual property pane on the right.
2. On the General tab, under the Route to section, enter the following information into the fields:
   • Specific user
   • User name
   • Gab@abctech

Ren follows similar steps for the Requester Approval step:

1. Click the Requester Approval step to open the contextual property pane.
2. Under the Route to section, enter the following information into the fields:
   • Specific user
   • Participant
   • Owner

In a Pega application, the Owner is defined as the individual that first initiated the case. For Ren's Content Request case type, the Owner and the Requester are the same.

Ren must activate the Owner participant profile for the application to work properly. To do this, Ren completes the following steps:

1. In the Content Request case life cycle window, click the Settings tab. 
   
2. In the menu that is displayed, select Participants.
3. Click Owner.
4. Select the Create participant automatically when the case starts check box.
5. Click Add.
6. Click the Workflow tab to return to the Content Request case life cycle window.
7. In the Content Request window, click Save.

Next, Ren configures the views for each approval step.

In Pega applications, a "view" is what the end-user sees when they access the live application. The views for both the supervisor and requester approval steps will be similar.

The Supervisor Approval step will contain a single new field called Supervisor review.

Ren completes the following steps to create the view:

1. Click the Supervisor Approval step to open the contextual property pane.
2. On the General tab, click Configure view.
3. Click the Trash icon to delete the Notes field.
4. Click +Add field.
5. In the Field name field, enter Supervisor review.
6. In the Type list, select Text (paragraph)
7. Click Submit for the field.
8. Click Submit for the view.
9.  Click Save.

Ren repeats the steps above to create a similar view for the Requestor Approval step.

Ren and Gab have decided to enable approval for both email and mobile devices. This allows the case to be approved or rejected outside of the Pega application and the User Portal.

In both cases, the user specified in the routing will receive a notification via email, text, or both, as in this case. The user will be able to access the project and process the approval or rejection from within the notification.

To configure the functionality for the Supervisor Approval step, Ren completes the following steps:

1. Click on the Supervisor Approval step to open the contextual property pane.
2. On the General tab, in the Enable approval from section, select both the Email and Mobile check boxes.
3. Ren has decided to use the default templates for both the Email subject/Push notification messages and the Email Content sections, so no changes need to be made to these settings.
4. Select the Included attachments check box.
5. Select the All case attachments radio button. 
6. Click Save.

Ren follows the same steps to configure email and mobile notifications for the Requester Approval step. 

In the following image, drag the center handle to see how the Requester Approval step is configured, and how it is displayed in the user portal: 

In your own Pega environment, configure an approval process. You can mirror Ren’s application, or configure the approval process for your own situation.