How to hold save operation till the workflow approvals are completed ?

Question

Hello,
The requirement is that on change of certain fields in customer master , an approval workflow should trigger and only after the chain of approvals is completed the change in customer master should be saved.
If standard provides the field eg in SWEC then its fine but otherwise is the following approach correct ?
1. Find a suitable user exit on save action
2. Determine whether the required field is changed or not using the std change history tables
3. if yes, trigger a custom event for the business object which wud be already linked to workflow.
that way the workflow will be triggered
4. now trigger another custom event in the workflow after all the approvals are completed
5. induce a wait for event for this approval-completed event in the user exit. so that till the time this event is generated, user exit processing is not completed (find if there is function module for wait event OR keep infinite loop)
Is this approach correct because its complete 'home-made' design and doesnt look very good to keep the user exit waiting for entire workflow which mite extend to even several days.
what should be the solution for this ?
thank you
B

Answer 1

Hi:
1. Find a suitable exit or BAdI on save action (even Enhancement point)
2. Check whether the required fields are changed or not, if yes- then display an information message saying, "Approval WF process started for the customer: XXXXX". Then after displaying the information message, system needs to behave like as an error mesaage was showned.
I mean, you need to come out of the current standard screen and the whole std. program (little bit tricky but it is possible to do), so we are not saving the data to database table.
3. Then after all approvals in WF, use std. FM or BAPI to update database tables for the changed data.
Vinoth