Validation on Execution of workitem

Question

Hi all,    
   I have  a scenario in which  a workitem with expense value 7000$ has  gone  for approval to manager1 in his UWL. Manager1 can approve expense upto 10000$ But when this  workitem  was  created Manager1 has  gone  on leave and  he has  substituted Manager2 for this approval. Manager2 has limit of approving expenses only upto 5000$.
  So what  I  want is  when this Manager 2 click on approval of this  workitem in his  UWL the  validation should happen  and it should  give Manager2 an Error message that ' 7000$ is higher  than your  approval limit' and workitem  should not get executed and should remain in Manager2 UWL so that  later when Manager1 comes Manager2 can  forward this workitem back to Manager1
   How  to  do this...should i  do this validation in my BO method then how to throw  error in UWL screen. else  if this validation is  to be done in JAVA or ABAP Webdynpro of UWL or  any other    way to achieve this...
Thanks in advance..

Answer 1

Michell,
As mentionned by Pavan, you can use a program exit for this. Look at the decision step in your workflow, tab Program Exit. Since you need to add something there I suggest you do a copy of the standard wf and use that one instead of the standard directly
There is a serious downside to this when using UWL however: the nice and sexy Java Webdynpro provided with the portal and used by default to handle decision tasks does not handle the program exits. That means you need to change the configuration of your UWL so that it calls the GUI decision screen instead of the WD.
I faced exactly the same issue in the same process and copntext (i.e. travel management wf in UWL), and that's the only solution I found for this. The other possibilities are too far from the SAP standard functionality, i.e.
- Changing the decision java WD
- Creating a task (including an object method and maybe a WD or BSP application) on your own in which you integrate the check on the approval power, and in the workflow replace the standard decision by that task.
I even opened a message to SAP support about the fact that their UWL decision WD does not support program exits. After months of frustrating discussions I have got the standard answer that "this works as designed". I have a development request opened at SAP since almost a year, with no feedback so far.
Hope this helps. In any case, I would really appreciate if you could post here what solution you end up with.
Thanks and regards,
Patrick