Report on Task Approvals

[RolandoLi]

We are testing the use of Approvals at the Task level and the different use-cases we may use this feature for.

1. Is there a way to report of Tasks that have been approved/rejected?
2. Is there a way to create a report that shows all the Task approvals pending for the logged in user?

[ryanbrogz]

I'd be pretty curious of this one as well. It seems like the Home > Work List > Approvals is the only place to see YOUR assigned pending approvals. But I'd personally like to roll that into a dashboard for our "Reviewer" license type users that aren't frequent users.

[KristianVeslov]

On point 2, we had a similar question. It was resolved by using the following filter via text mode:

awaitingApprovals:userID=$$USER.ID

awaitingApprovals:userID_Mod=in

project:status=CUR

project:status_Mod=in

This returns all approvals which are currently assigned to the logged in user, but there is currently no way to surface that and show their name in the report. As such, we pull in task assigned to, though this may not always be who the approval is assigned to.

On point 1, there are 2 fields in the API explorer which could work, at least to show approved approvals. I'm still testing this out though, so please take with a pinch of salt. I'll try and remember to update once testing is completed.

Regards

K

[RolandoLi]

Thank you. I tried this but I'm not having success. I created a test Task in a Current project and added an Approval process with myself assigned as the approver. The task doesn't show up. Am I missing something?

[ryanbrogz]

I scrolled through the list of reporting filters a little slower on a Task Level report and found the Task Pending Approval option. You could combine that with Assignment Users ID equal $$USER to get all tasks pending approval for the logged in user (assuming the user is assigned to the task as well).

Also, there's the Task Is Approval filter which you could leverage and combine with Task Status to get the same set of results.

I'm trying to get in the habit of using more prompts so I can have the same report do 2+ different things (My Pending Approvals and My Completed Approvals, for instance). You could put these as custom prompts and not have any filters "baked in" to the report too.

My Pending Approvals custom prompt: assignmentsUsersMM:ID=$$USER.ID&assignmentsUsersMM:ID_Mod=in&pendingApproval=true&pendingApproval_Mod=eq

My Completed Approvals custom prompt:

isApproval=true&isApproval_Mod=eq&assignmentsUsersMM:ID=$$USER.ID&assignmentsUsersMM:ID_Mod=in&status=CPL&status_Mod=in

[RolandoLi]

Thank you for your reply @Ryan Brogneri‚ Unfortunately, the approver is not always assigned to the task in our case. Some files we upload we require the client to approve and the client is never assigned to a task.

I agree with you on Prompt Filters. We use them a lot to avoid duplicate reports based on some filter that often changes. =)

[skyehansen · Accepted solution]

Since there can be multiples on one object, you are looking in collections for this information, so first and foremost, familiarize yourself with how to filter on a collection here: https://one.workfront.com/s/document-item?bundleId=the-new-workfront-experience&topicId=Content%2FRe...

If you have not ever gone to the API explorer, please start there: https://one.workfront.com/s/api-explorer . You are on a task report so filter on Task and click on its collections tab to find out more about the collection you are interested in. For us, it's the approver status (I'm guessing -- this is the most intuitive name). So click to open it and then click on its link to find all its fields.

From here on out, it's experimentation. You know you're looking for statuses and IDs. So just try all the combinations until you find one that works for you. Handy tip: You can expose this information in a column in a View to help you determine what is in there (the first link I referenced above will also help you with columns). I find if I just concat everything into a view and filter on a test task, I can see what is being displayed on that task and it will help me compose my filter.

For filtering pending approvals on the logged in user, could you experiment with something like this?

approverStatuses:status=AA

approverStatuses:status_Mod=in

approverStatuses:wildcardUserID=$$USER.ID

and then for filtering the approved or rejected tasks, something along these lines?

approverStatuses:status=AD RJ

approverStatuses:status_Mod=in

(the two statuses are separated by a tab character of course)

You'd have to validate on your own system of course. Our system doesn't use approvals very much so I don't have a lot of variations to run QA/QC on.