Exclude a participant for a role while assigning an instance.

Question

Hello
I'm trying to implement an approval process using ALBPM 5.7.
Would like to know if there is a way of excluding a participant from a role and send the instance to all other participant.
Do you have any suggestions or a solution?
Thanks.

Answer 1

I'm sure there are other ways to do this, but here are a couple approaches you've probably already thought of that have worked in the past to do this.
One approach is to allow the screenflow associated with the Interactive activity to prevent the designated end user from invoking the work item instance. You'd pass in the name of the participant you want excluded into the screenflow as a variable. Inside the screenflow, you'd have a conditional transition from the Begin to a Interactive Component Call task with a screen that tells the designated end user that they cannot use this work item instance. The logic in this conditional transition going to this task would check to see if the name in the variable passed into the screenflow is equal to the predefined variable "Participant.name" (note the uppercase "P" in participant). Once the Interactive Component Call task completes it would flow to an Automatic Task that has the logic "action = CANCEL" and then flows to the End task in the Screenflow. The drawback to this approach is that designated end user will be able to see the work item instance in their inbox and they will be able to click on it (although they won't be able to take an action on it). The benefits are that this is simple to set up (a conditional transition and a couple tasks in a Screenflow).
A second approach is more complicated, but more interactive. On the fly, you'd create a parametric role. This parametric role for this work item instance would have every participant in the role except for the designated person. When the work item instance flows across to the Interactive activity inside the parametric role, the designated employee won't see the instance and everyone else would be able to see it. The drawback to this approach is that you're creating a bunch of new parametric roles (one for each work item instance). The benefit is that the designated end user won't be able to click the instance since it won't even appear in their inbox.
Dan