Adding Approvals to your Forms and adding Can Approve permissions.
Approvals Sections include the following functionality.
Template administrators can:
- Add Approval sections to form templates.
- Choose which staff are Approvers.
Form users can:
- Submit forms for Approval.
- Be notified when their forms are Approved or Rejected.
- View their forms that are waiting for Approval, and which have been Approved or Rejected.
Approvers can:
- Be notified when they have been asked to Approve forms
- View pending requests
- Approve or Reject requests
Availability
The Approvals Workflow functionality is available on Premium and Enterprise plans.
It was released around August 2017. If your Damstra Forms server is older than that then the functionality might not yet be switched on. Contact us via email or the messenger in the bottom right of the screen.
Administrators
Approval sections in Form templates
When you’re editing a Form template, the Template Editor has a button for adding a new approval section. You can also drag a section from the field selector on the left.
Approvals sections contain standard fields with special properties:
Field Behaviour
Approver: A list of Project Members who have Can Approve permission.
Requester The name of the user who submitted the form for Approval.
Signature The Approver’s signature, which must be signed when approving.
Date The date that the Approver assigns to the Approval or Rejection. It automatically defaults to the current date.
Commentary Optional text entry field for the Approver to enter comments.
Status It's automatically set to “Not Submitted for Approval”, “Submitted for Approval”, “Approved” or “Rejected”.
Note:
- The display of those fields varies for users and Approvers according to the status and context.
- Their display names can be changed.
- The Commentary field can be moved up/down within the section.
- No other fields can be put into an approval section.
Form locking
When a form is submitted for Approval, all parts above the Approvals section are automatically locked so that they cannot be edited by the user or Approver. However, the user can edit the form and choose “Clear Request” to withdraw the request for Approval and remove the lock.
If there are other Approvals section/s above then the edit lock is only removed for the parts of the form up until to the previously-completed Approval section.
After a form is Approved or Rejected, the Approver can edit the form and choose “Clear Approval” or “Clear Rejection”, which resets the form’s status to “Not Submitted for Approval” (like “Clear request” does). All of those options become unavailable when a form is closed.
Multiple Approval Sections
You can put multiple Approvals sections into a form template.
Mandatory fields
The behavior of mandatory fields changes when an Approvals section is present. The Approvals process takes precedence over the normal rules about saving to a project.
Mandatory fields before (above) an Approvals section get checked when the form is being submitted for Approval instead of when saving to project.
Mandatory fields after (below) an Approvals section are not treated as mandatory until the section has been Approved or Rejected. That means the initial user of the form can be required to enter some details, and then a later user of the form can be required to enter other details.
Who can Approve my forms?
A user can be made an Approver if they:
- have membership of the project that contains the form, and
- are a Super or External type user. Note: External Users don’t require access to a template (via Default Templates or Project Templates) in order to Approve/Reject that template’s forms.
To make a user an Approver, edit their Project Membership to turn on “Can approve” permission.
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