I'm trying to update the display name / request summary to something that's easy to understand to the approver. Their is currently no template meachanism to support this.

I've tried to update the request's displayname in a workflow activity, however the update is in the request history but still the old hard to understand request summary is displayed.

Then I figured out that the approval object has an attribute request, after which I tried to get the object using various query combination using wsenum. Without success.

Being desperate, I decided to update the database directly, with success. IS THEIR ANOTHER WAY TO THIS? I Would prefer to do this using the normal platform service.

John,

I would be careful about trying to modify request objects since every attempt to do anything in FIM is a request.

As for retrieving the request object from the approval object: the request attribute is a reference to retrieve a request object linked to an approval object
/Approval/Request -- would return all request objects linked to approval objects (request objects not linked to approval objects would not show up

/Approval[ Approver=/Person[EmployeeType = 'Full Time Employee']]/Request -- All request objects linked to approval objects where the approver is of employeeType 'Full Time Employee'


/Approval[Request=/Request[CreatedTime= subtract-dayTimeDuration-from-dateTime(xs:dayTimeDuration("P2DT0H"), current-dateTime())] and Approver=/Person[EmployeeType = 'Full Time Employee']]/Request -- This is just the like the one above plus it will limit the requests to those made in the last two days (I can't recall if thexs:dayTimedDuration is needed or not)


As for updating the database directly -- please don't do that. Definitely unsupported and likely to break things, such as your desire to be able to show auditors that all changes come through as requests.

Was there ever a final solution for this besides not doing int  I also need some user friendly description text to show in the description and I am looking for a solution.

• Edited by FIM_Admin Thursday, July 12, 2012 9:15 PM

Was there ever a final solution for this besides not doing int  I also need some user friendly description text to show in the description and I am looking for a solution.

• Edited by FIM_Admin Thursday, July 12, 2012 9:15 PM

I love how everyone here dogged the guy out for trying to accomplish something the wrong way, but NEVER advised him of another way to get this very sensible request done.  NICE

Ok, someone out there must have tackled this!  Don't be shy!

@gdtilghman

While I disagree that "Everyone here" was dogging John, I am the only one that responded, so it is not as though there was a large group of people piling it on, I do agree that I didn't provide him an alternative solution. I did explain why the proposed method was not a good one, but I didn't dig deeper to try and understand what is trying to be accomplished.

So let's start a new thread where you guys can try and describe what you are trying to accomplish, not just the technical bits, but what you are trying to do for the end-user.

It sounds like you all want to make it easier for the end-user to understand requests when they look at them. In what way? Do you want to make it easier to see the Approvals? The Change summary?  If so in what way? What do you want the end-user to see?

I have modified the RCDC on the Request object to pull in the approval information to make it easier to understand, by letting the end user see who has approved/rejected the request as well as to see if an approval is still outstanding and who can respond to that. Is that what you all are lookin

Hi David thanks for the response. End users complain that the approvals make no sense and if they have several to dig through the are quite unfriendly and cannot quickly see what was requested without digging. To the end I am trying to the following with approvals:

1. Customize the display name shown in the first column of "My Approvals" to something other than "Update to Person: John Smith". I would like to programmatically change it based on the equest type. For instance "New Payroll Account Requested for John Smith" or "New OCS Account Requested for John Smith".
2. Inside of the approval object, I would like to change it to to clearly show what is being requested, by who and who approved it.

If you have any examples that you can share that would be great. I am not asking you to do my job but any pointers or at least a starting point would be most helpful since the MS documentation is, ahem, thin.

Cheers!

Hi David, I know that you are busy but any insight in this area would be most helpful!

Has anyone else had any luck customizing this area?

I am also interested in doing what the original poster is trying to do, but also had a different angle I was trying to take that has brought me to the same conclusion..... it seems to be that request objects are hardened in some way to not allow edits.

My current problem I was trying to attack was to change the Expiration time on certain requests to be able to keep them in the portal longer.  I enabled some test MPRs to have full control over requests objects but still does not allow me to edit them in any way.  It makes sense why that's not allowed from a traceability point of view that these should never be able to be edited as far as the content, but would be nice if some fields were.

For events I wanted to keep, I made a workflow to extend the expiration to 90 days as opposed to the default of 30, but it never takes effect on requests.  works for other objects though.

If anyone is aware how to edit requests in a clean way I think that would resolve both issues.

This is a problem that we recently ran into.  We found that if there is a large number of approvals, it was difficult for an approver to bulk approve all of them because the details necessary for approval were buried within the request and not displayed at the 'Approve Requests' screen.

As a proof of concept, we successfully created a Set/MPR/Workflow to update the DisplayName of the Approval object.

Before:

After:

Solution:

• Criteria Based Set: Approvals where Approval Status is Pending
• Workflow: Simple Function Evaluator (for Testing) to set the [//Target/DisplayName] with a static string.  Will probably require a custom activity for this to be dynamic and support all the different kinds of requests.
• MPR: Set Transition-In

*Note: You may need to grant permission to update the DisplayName on Approval Objects

-Jason