Emailing approver that has been added after ticket creation

[Tim Peters]

I have a ticket in service desk that has been submitted without an approver. The service desk agent determines that an approval is needed and manually adds the approver. Is there a way to send an email to the newly added approver with the Approve button? So far I've only been able to have Service Desk send the email if the approver is added when the ticket is created.

Thanks,

Tim

[Earl McCutcheon · Accepted solution]

Hi @Tim Peters ,

It sounds like you have the Approvers field added to either the Edit or View Screen allowing it to be modified ad-hoc, and when an issue is edited it triggers a Update event to process the notifications, but the approver notification is sent when the issue is transitioned into an approval status, and cannot be triggered on the update event.

To Get around this and make sure the notification is sent any time a approver is added to the field, Remove the Approver Field from the View and edit Screens, then set up the workflow in a way that the approver field can only be added during a transition, exe add a screen to the Approval status that includes the Approvers field and then add a looping transition from the approval status back to itself call it something like "Add Approver"  add a custom screen to this transition that only has the Approvers field, this way the approver can be added by selecting the transition and the notification will be sent to the approver that was added at that point of the workflow.

EXE, the following workflow would create the issue in the waiting for approval status, and notify any user added to approvers on the create issue screen or the default approver that was set, and then allow users to trigger the add approver transition to trigger the screen with only the approver field, and send a notification to the new approver on transition:

Another option If you are not initiating a transition to add the approver, you could get around this by creating a filter like the following to indicate the issues that a specific user currently needs to approve, then ask your approvers to subscribe to the filter based on their name, or you could create a dashboard filter for them to work out of for daily tasks:

Approvals = pendingBy("user@email.com")

For the subscription See This KB  for advice on setting up a cron job to run on an interval for the subscription, and you could set up the interval to your needs like a once a day action or on an interval throughout the day, or week depending on the timelines your users would check their e-mail.

Regards,
Earl

[Norma Pena]

Hey @Earl McCutcheon 

I hope this message finds you well. I have a quick question about the workflow you outlined.

In a situation where an issue already has existing approvers and has been approved, could you provide guidance on how to filter or set conditions to specifically target and send an approval email only to the newly added approver?

Thank you for your assistance!

[Tim Peters]

Thanks @Earl McCutcheon I'll give that a try.

Tim