Line Manager

Question

Hi,
I have a little problem, I have a small approval process, which is started by a requestor and then the next step is, that the direct line manager of the requestor has to approve or reject the request. So I find out who is the line manager (by an external service call, so that's not the problem) and make a participant.next assignment. So far, it works without a problem.
But now the problem is, the approval-activity is in a role Line Manager, which has to contain all line managers of the organization. And if I do so, the line manager can do an unassign and the request goes back to the role, what, of course, should not happen, since only the particular line manager (or his deputy) is allowed to approve or reject the request. Similar issue is, if the line manager is disabled, because in this case all process instances are unassigned.
So, the question is, how can I manage a direct assignment, so that there is no possibility for the assigned person to unassign it and there is no way from outside (e.g. disabling a participant) that an unassignment is done?
Thanks for your help.
Kind regards
Matthias

Answer 1

Hi Matthias,
One OOTB thing you can do is as you assign participants to the "Line Manager" role on Enterprise, do not check the "Reassign", "Delegate", "Escalate" and "Peer Assignment" check boxes. This will keep your end users from assigning the work item to someone else. They'll still be able to unassign the work item instances, but at least they will not be able to assign them to someone else.
I'm sure someone has a better way to do this, but here's a shot at it. You'd put the logic shown below inside a Global Automatic activity inside the same process. Set the Global Automatic's property to "Poll by Interval" every few minutes. In this logic, my Interactive activity's Id is "Interactive". Change this to be the Id (not the name) of your Interactive activity.
It first checks to see if someone has unassigned it ("if partName = null or partName = "" then.."). If it's assigned to someone, then it checks to see if that person is still enabled ("if !part.enabled then...").
I wasn't sure what you wanted to do at that point so I just assigned the instance to a "supervisor" if the instance was either unassigned or assigned to a participant who was disabled.
bp as BusinessProcess
do
    instF as InstanceFilter = InstanceFilter()
    instances as Fuego.Papi.Instance[]
    instanceDescription as String
    connectTo bp
        using url = Fuego.Server.directoryURL,
              user = "AUTOCLIENT",
              password = "P",
              process = "/" + processName
    create(instF, processService : bp.processService)
    instF.searchScope = SearchScope(participantScope : ParticipantScope.ALL,
          statusScope : StatusScope.ONLY_INPROCESS)
    // change this to be the id (not the name)
    //      of your Interactive activity
    addAttributeTo instF
       using variable = VarDefinition.ACTIVITY_ID,
          comparator = Comparison.IS,
          value = "Interactive"       
    instances = getInstancesByFilter(bp, filter : instF)
    for each inst in instances do
       logMessage "Found it: " + inst.id
       do
           partName as String
           partName = String(getVar(inst, var : "PREDEFINE_PARTICIPANT"))
           part as Participant
           // Has someone unassigned it?
           if partName = null or partName = "" then
                  reasign inst
                      using participant = "supervisor"
           // If it is assigned to someone, is that person still enabled?
           else
                  part = part.find(name : partName)
                  if !part.enabled then
                       reasign inst
                          using participant = "supervisor"
                  end
           end
       on e as Exception
          logMessage "Exception: ->" + e.message
       end  
    end
on exit
    disconnectFrom bp
endHope this helps,
Dan