The Dynamics Explorer

Introduction

Recently I encountered a requirement for a workflow to be created that would send an approval to multiple users, however only one of the approvers needed to approve the request for the workflow to be fulfilled.

This post walks through how I achieved this using a Workflow User Group, and some tweaks to the standard Workflow.

Although at first I thought this would be relatively straight forward to configure, I did hit a bump in the road on way (see step 5 below). Hopefully this post will help others who encounter the same issue 🙂

Scenario

For the approval of Vendors its been decided the approval should be sent to two approvers, however only one approver needs to approve the request, for the approval to be fulfilled. Therefore, when one approver approves the request, all open approval entries for the other approver should be closed.

Step 1 – Workflow User Group

The first step is to configure a Workflow User Group with our approvers as per below:

As you can there are two approvers in the Workflow User Group, and I’ve entered a sequence number of 1 for each user.

Step 2 – Workflow Setup

To create the Workflow I’ll use a Workflow Template as per below:

I’ll then edit the workflow as described in the steps below.

Step 3 – Add the Workflow User Group to the Workflow

First, I’ll add the workflow user group as the approver type, and select my workflow user group I created earlier.

Step 4 – Edit the Events and Conditions

Next, I’ll change the “On Condition” for the second step to “Always” and also remove the third step:

The Bump in the road

At this point although the workflow would work, I found an approval entry is left open for the approver who didn’t approve, even though the record restriction on the Vendor was removed.

Step 5 – Add the additional response

In order to have the workflow close open approval entries after one approval you need to edit the second step and add the response “Approve the approval request for the record”

Conclusion

I found that without the additional Step 5 in the process of configuring the Workflow, one of the approvers would get a build up of open approval entries even though the Vendor would have been approved.

I hope this helps anyone else trying to configure a similar workflow.

Thanks for reading!