Manually created approvals are not sent out automatically - Support and Troubleshooting

Manually created approvals are not sent out automatically Issue In Standard Change Proposal when adding an approval group manually to the record from the Group Approvals related list, the Approvals related lists is updated with the members of the group to send approvals to but the approvals are in the state "Not Yet Requested"

Cause This is default OOTB (out of the box) configuration and behaviour.

The Group approvals form has the field "Assignment Group" the approvals that get created this way are sent to the members of the group that is specified in this field.

The Group approvals form also has the "Approval" field which is populated with "Not Yet Requested". This is set in the default value on the dictionary entry of the field.

There are several choices in this list eg, Requested, Approved, Rejected, etc

If an approval is generated manually and the Approval field is left on its default "Not Yet Requested" then the approval records created are not sent out to any of the members in the group. The State of all the approvals generated from this action will all have the same value of "not Yet Requested"

Likewise if the Approval field is changed to "Requested" then the approvals that are generated will have the same value and will be sent to the members listed in the group.

If the Approval is generated as "Not Yet requested" you have to manually change them to Requested (or approved) by selecting them in the Approvals related list and use the Actions on related list to send them out using the Request Approval.

In the related case the cause was because the customer had modified the Group approval form so the Approval field is read only so the default could only be changed by admin user. The customer also had mdofied the "Actions on selected rows" so the option to "Request approval" was not available. The customer also had the "manual" approvals generated by a workflow activity.

Resolution Compared this with OOTB (out of the box) behaviour and it is the same Adding additional approvers from the Group approvals related list is a manual process.

The OOB (Out of box) procedure: Click New on in the Group approvals related list A new group approval record opens Click on the magnifier icon on the Assignment Group field and select a group to add The Approval field is populated with "Not Yet Requested" by default If it is left as default the approvals added will all show as "Not Yet Requested" If the field is changed to "Requested" all the approvals will show as "Requested" and so on. If the field is left as "Not Yet Requested" then you will have to go to the list of approvers that are added in the Approvers tab, check all the ones that are in "Not Yet Requested" and from the "Actions on selected rows" button at the bottom of the list, click the Arrows and select "Request Approval"

The default functionality was working as expected on the customers instance but was restricted by some of their customisations On the customers instance the "Approval" field is read only and can only be changed by admin and the "Request approval" option in the "Actions on selected rows" is not available. The approvals were not being generated "manually" in the true sense by human interaction but rather by a workflow activity using the OOB functionality.The customer had a modified "Standard Change Proposal" workflow to include an approval mechanism which uses a script that creates the "manual" group approvals.

To resolve the issue for the customer in the related case they were advised to set the default value on the "Approval" field to "requested" on the dictionary level so when a "manual' approval is generated from the workflow activity, the approvals will all be set to "Requested" and it will automatically send the approval requests to the members of the group.

Tested this successfully on the customer instance