Approval Workflows

Today we are customizing an approval workflow, which lets us peer into the bleak soul of the task assignment system. We are doing this through the lens of allowing people to request vacation time without filling out two copies of a form and asking for manual signatures on those forms.

Signatures: Good for cheques - someone should see where the money goes - bad for routine chores.

The first thing you will need to do is create a new subsite and set it up to handle calendars. Then add a calendar. Set up two groups of people in your permissions, one who can ask for things, a second that can approve things. Reflect that Sharepoint prefers groups, though you sure don't.

Got it? Good.

Calendar created, you need to get it to trigger a workflow programmatically to send things to the correct people. This will require a custom content type, so you can attach a name to a vacation request, and a workflow.

In Browser: Custom Content Types

1. Site Settings >> Galleries >> Site content types
2. Tiiiiny thing that says "Create" right there at the top
3. Make your new content type, have it inherit from Event.
4. Set it up as part of your custom content types group
1. If you don't have one, make a new group and put it there.
5. Head to your calendar.
6. List Settings.
7. Content Types
1. Add From Existing Site Content Types
2. Add your custom content type. I called mine Vacation Request.
1. Why-eeee?
2. This means that when you click "create new," something called "Vacation Request" will be available in your list of New Things Available, and this will make everyone in your office think you are a genius.
8. Your Custom Content Types will only be available to your subsite unless you create them on the main site level.

They spend whole marketing presentations on this $h!t in the corporate world. Really. Thousands of dollars to rename an "event" a "vacation request." JOB. SECURITY.

Workflows
Workflows seem super-accessible and intuit- no. No they don't. Because graphic scripting engines are weird and because they can be added to any list item from about three places, workflows are heinously counterintuitive.

There are lots of "reusable" workflows in sharepoint, but they're not really reusable in any way that makes sense.

You can attach some to your calendar via the calendar page itself, edit "workflow settings" and good luck to you because these things are recursive and strange. Better: write your own via Sharepoint Designer.

1. Open SP Designer.
2. Navigate to your subsite.
3. Open your specific list. 
4. Look for the little window that says "workflows" and is empty.
5. Create a New Workflow
6. Add an "approval" by adding a step, and from the action menu, adding "start approval process."
7. You can then customise the thing specifically to accept or reject whatever.
8. But your rejected vacation requests will remain in play because rejected documents are thought to be good for editing. You need that cleaned.
9. Add a second workflow*
• *Sharepoint ain't give a fuck 'bout efficiency. You can, in theory, do this all with one. Do not bother.
10. Add a step and load a condition: If Current Item:Approval Status equals 1;#Rejected
1. Add the result: Delete item in Your Calendar Name
11. It will pop a warning, because selecting that way will wipe any rejected item in that calendar, which is sometimes not preferred in larger document libraries but works fine for us.

So this is pretty straightforward, and it remains so as long as you do this kind of design, custom, every time. You can, in theory, build great reusable workflows. But as you can see, at least part of the clearing-out-ness requires a specific calendar name, and we have built this thing in a specific subsite. 

The other ways of doing this take three pages of writing and a quarter of gin. Just do it this way. It is the least painful.