118 - Approvals in Dynamics NAV 2018 Pt. 7

Approvals in Dynamics NAV 2018 Pt. 7   

Today we are going to deep dive into the approvals structure but a couple of things first, I got a question on one of the videos of how I actually log in as multiple users on one machine, you can see here, I’m logged in as demo, if I go in here I’m logged in as Paul. It's very simple you just have to go in here, in this dark menu right click on the icon and say, run as a different user and then you can actually run multiple instances in different users on the same machine so, hopefully, that explains it.

Changing a workflow
Now what we are gonna get into today is actually changing a workflow, so if I go into the workflows like we did before (remember its workflows with an S)

Right now I have set up a standard workflow for sales documents called Sale Order Approval Workflow right here, if I go into that, and this is the standard workflow where we are basically sending for approval and you know if it's approved then it removes releases, if its rejected it goes back to open, etc, and notifications are going back and forward.

So this is the structure that is being delineated. I actually have a real problem, its a problem we had with the old approval system, I was trying to solve and I couldn't solve it the way it was before. Now that we have this structure I want to try to solve this using that. It’s a real-life problem.The problem was for a particular customer we don't want an approval process, we basically want the user to be able to release it. How do we do that?

Actually here on the first line, you can see an approval of sales document is requested on condition. We can actually change this I've done that already, just to show you how this could be done, If I go in here, I basically have a filter. I can do any filter I like.

And what I’ve done here is a setup. I don't want this to affect customer number 10,000 so not 10,000, that means that hits approval workflow will not work for 10,000. So basically if I sent something for an approval if it's not 10,000 it will go through here if it is 10,000 it will not. I’m gonna enable this and close that out. Now I have this approval on condition, what about the condition where it is? And I have here this test.

So I created another workflow called test, its pretty much a copy of the other one, it's in the sales doc category and here I actually say, well if the customer number is 1,000 then response, so in here ideally we would like to have documented just release and I have not been able to do that, so in case of this being the case and you actually go through customer 1,000 or 10,000 for the approval.

What I’m gonna do is just show a message and basically I’m gonna say here, this customer does not need approval. So that people will just know that they can just release it. ht ok, I’m gonna remove this line and enable this. Let's see what happens. As you can see I’m already modifying the structure so the point of the video is you can modify and do a lot of different things, what could happen here is that it actually does not allow me to release it but maybe it will so let's see.

Now I have enabled two sales order approval workflows, one called test which is specifically for 1,000 and on the sales order approval workflow which is standard it's not for 10,000. So let's go ahead and try this out, I go in as Paul, create a new one and obviously, I’m gonna do this for 10,000 because that's kind of more interesting

We can also do it for not 10,000 and let go ahead and do this, we sell that Paris guest chairs; I was just in Paris, love it there; chairs are probably really nice that come from Paris; Now we sent approval request, it says this customer does not need approval, it works! Great. So can I release it?, uh. I can not So, I can't even have a message box that says it, so let's go ahead and change this again. It's a little bit like this with the approvals. If I just go into this one and I say, well I’ll just take it away, not gonna do that.

So I have nothing happening for 10,000 what can I do then?, well if I go into the Cannon group again, actually this one is released. Let's create a new one again.

One of the things that happen is that it creates an approval workflow process and you kind of have to cancel it, if you want to work for the same order again but anyways. We go ahead and to the Paris guest chairs, what happens now If I send for approval? nothing ok? No approval workflow for this record I enable, so what if we do if we hit released?, boom, releases, so this is a solution so if you can teach your people that if it comes up with no workflow you can just release, however, if I do it for somebody else.

We pick another customer oh my god we are gonna sell it to somebody else in the canon group, what's coming over me?, but I’ll still get to see the Paris chair, creatures of habit so, we keep going from the yellow 5 so, what we would expect in this case is that it would go to a standard approval process, and it does, now its pending approval and its good.

Here you’ve seen how we can actually change the approvals, create multiple different approvals, I could have had another approval process for 10,000 but if there is an approval process I think it has to go into pending approval an wait for another step, so I couldn't find the way around that, if you do, maybe you can put a comment.

This also opens up for programming, you could program steps, create or your developer can create steps that you can then select the approval process. So it's flexible to a certain extent and can be extremely flexible if you open up the development it's always the case.

Anyways this was a long one, I hope you got something out of it.