Capturing the Actual Responder for a notification sent to a Distribution List in Outlook

Question

Hello All,
Morning , need some guidance on the issue mentioned below which we are currently facing.
We had a requirement to send Oracle Workflow Notification to a Distribution List maintained within Microsoft Outlook Mail client/server. The email address of the users which are part of the DL would be setup in this DL . lets say this DL has the
mailing address as : [email protected] which has 4 users in it let's say Oracle Apps FND users : A (email id - [email protected]), B (email id - [email protected]) , C(email id - [email protected]) , D (email id - [email protected]) with their respective email address . This email address within Oracle Apps would be linked at the FND User setup as well as in the HRMS Employee Setup --. Official details section
For this we created a ad hoc role name : 'Role_abcd' as below , then set ad hoc role attribute as shown below ( in the display name and email address we specify the email address created for the Distribution List )
wf_directory.createadhocrole
                                       (role_name                    => 'Role_abcd',
                                        role_display_name            => 'Role_abcd',
                                        notification_preference      => 'MAILATTH'
wf_directory.setadhocroleattr
                                      (role_name                    => 'Role_abcd',
                                       display_name                 => '[email protected]',
                                       email_address                => '[email protected]',
                                       notification_preference      => 'MAILATTH'  );
Finally we set the Notification Performer
Item Attribute (Next_Approver) and assign the role name ('Role_abcd') created above to this performer :
wf_engine.setitemattrtext (itemtype      => p_in_itemtype,
                                       itemkey       => p_in_itemkey,
                                       aname         => 'NEXT_APPROVER',
                                       avalue        => 'Role_abcd' );
Now we are able to successfully send the workflow notifications to this Outlook DL and all the 4 users : A,B,C & D would get the same notification to their email address mentioned as a part of the DL.
Issue :
Now lets say user A Approves this notification from email notification itself using mail id : [email protected] , In this scenario the Responder name which is getting captured in the wf_notifications table is not consistent , sometimes it is getting populated as : email:[email protected] and sometimes as the value for the recipient role/original recipient itself : Role_abcd .This appears to be wrong
Ideally this responder column in wf_notifications table should get populated as  ( email:[email protected] ) so that we could identify as to which person within the DL has responded to the notification.
Could someone please help as to how this could be acheived (to identify the actual responder for workflow notification sent to a Outlook Distribution List
Thanks

Answer 1

The following is the criteria when responding notification from email.
1. If there is no user/role exists for the email address from which the notification is responded, the responder column value will be in the form 'email:[email protected]'.
2. If there is only one user/role exists for the email address, then responder column value will be populated with that particular user/role.
3. If there are multiple user/roles with the same email address, then responder column value will be populated with the user in the following preference order
     PER -> FND_USR -> OTHERS
What is the customer code lne.
The fix mentioned in step3 was given in 12.1.3 only. The earlier versions have the responder column value will be in the form 'email:[email protected]' if there are multiple users exists for the same email address.