Delegate in workflow

Is delegation supported in TS workflows?
e.g. when an approver goes on leave, he might nominate another TS user to be an approver for a specified period of time.
So during the absence of original approver, tasks will be delivered to the delegate's inbox.
The original approver automatically takes over after the specified period.
If its not supported OOTB, has anyone implemented it with custom development?

TIA

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Comments

Adam Stoller

There is no OOTB automated way to do this. Manually, the owner of a specific task may re-assign the task to someone else through the Job Admin UI. Programmatically one could do this with an externaltask, or even a separate cron-like script, and configuration file - such that for a certain period of time any tasks found to be owned by / assigned to a certain user (UserA) are re-assigned to another user (UserB) - look at the methods available in TeamSite::WFtask for doing the reassignment and in both TeamSite::WFtask and TeamSite::WFworkflow to traverse the workflows / tasks to find the tasks that need to be re-assigned.

I haven't done this, so I don't have any code handy, but I suspect it should take about a week's worth of effort to design/develop/debug it.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Migrateduser

It sure is a good idea, though. Certainly worthy of a feature request.

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

nipper

No question it is a nice to have.

We have implemented it. Need something to keep a record of who is replacing who (we use BEA WLS). Then it is a simple matter of, in the WF perl, checking who the reviewer is & if they are on vacation. & then make the delegate the reviewer.

We also make the change, if I submit & Smitty was the reviewer, but had me as the delegate, then we bypass the review step (with a timeout of 0)

Pretty easy to implement, has 2 downsides. 1st, only one level of delegates are checked so if the delegate is on vaction, it will wait (this is easy to implement has not been an issue) 2nd, the delegates are chosen at WF instantiation. So if the reviewer leaves mid workflow, he will have the task waiting when he returns. That can be gotten around with the master change owner (or in our case, the review is a group task with the reviewer and tsadm group override).

HTH (in fact, it has to help more than Smitty's answer) :-)

Andy