Approval Workflow « Gravity Support Forums

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twescott
Member

I'd like to use Gravity Forms to automate approval-driven business processes. For example:

A manager in my division needs to hire a new employee for their area, and so they navigate to my page and fill out a requisition form which I've created with Gravity.

Upon submission of the form, using the out of the box notification settings, alerts are sent to the appropriate approvers, IE, myself and another Vice President.

In the notification email, a link is provided that takes me back to the form, where I can Approve or Deny the request. If myself, and the other approver, indicate that the form is Approved, a new notification is provided to the manager who originally created the form.

Likewise, if the request is denied, a notification is sent to the manager who originally created the form.

Creating the form itself, and blasting out email notifications to a set list of approvers is the easy part. How, though, can I drive this approval workflow into Gravity?

Posted 12 years ago on Thursday April 19, 2012 | Permalink
David Peralty

You could add a note to each entry and have that note sent to the e-mail address of the person that submitted it. But beyond that, there isn't an out of the box way to set-up an approval system.

Posted 12 years ago on Thursday April 19, 2012 | Permalink
twescott
Member

Thank you. I had this same thought as I explored my form waiting for an answer here.
As a quick and dirty solution, this may be adequate.

Are there any suggestions on how to accomplish this with custom coding?
Ideally, I'd like to show the names of the approvers at the top of my form, and also show their respective approval statuses, so that the user who originally submitted the form can come back in real time and see the status of his request.

Posted 12 years ago on Thursday April 19, 2012 | Permalink
David Peralty

There isn't any way to edit the entries section of the GF admin and so the solution would be complex.

It would require creating a new Gravity Form, pulling the needed data into it, adding additional fields relating to who approved it and what status it was given. Such a solution would require a great deal of custom code and as such is beyond the support I can give here. I would have to ask the developers for information/resources to be able to even point you in the right direction.

Posted 12 years ago on Thursday April 19, 2012 | Permalink
David Peralty

Team gave me another suggestion. You could have Admin Only fields that are invisible. From there a manager could log in to WordPress, go to the Entry and edit it. Unfortunately, as far as I know, this won't instantly send out an e-mail relating to the changed details though there is a resend notification button that would allow you to e-mail them the details. Might give you more of what you are looking for than just the notes field.

Posted 12 years ago on Thursday April 19, 2012 | Permalink
twescott
Member

Interesting. I'll play around with that and see what that looks like.

Not to continue complicating this idea, but, many of the approvers in my organization aren't very tech savvy. And while logging in and editing a field isn't a complicated task, I can foresee some complication for our lay users.

It would be great if the original notification email could contain a link that would take my approvers directly to a field for editing, or to a button that said something as simple as 'Approve' or 'Deny'.
That way, the approval/denial workflow could be conducted in as few steps as possible, without requiring much from the approvers.

If you, or your team, or anyone else reading this, has any other idea along these lines, I'd very much appreciate their thoughts. Otherwise, I really appreciate your time so far.

Posted 12 years ago on Thursday April 19, 2012 | Permalink
andydarnell
Member

@twescott - I'm trying to do the exact same thing. Please let me know if you are able to create a solution.

Posted 12 years ago on Monday April 23, 2012 | Permalink
UniverseNZ
Member

Any further development on this particular function? I'd be happy to pay for a Approval plugin. At least $150 to give me the ability to add an approval process for submitted forms.

Process overview:

1. Employee fills form on intranet
2. Form is submitted, a link is generated and sent to HR
3. HR reviews form (attached to e-mail) and has two links: Approve or Deny.
4. Employee recieves notification that form was approved or denied
5. Some extra conditional fields in the original form are also triggered by the Approval/Rejection process which sends more notifications to other divisions ie. IT.

Posted 11 years ago on Monday August 27, 2012 | Permalink
Naomi
Member

You probably want to post this on the Job Board here: http://www.gravityhelp.com/forums/forum/job-board

But, my recent Gravity Forms work might be able to help you out. Email me: http://naomicbush.com/email-me

Posted 11 years ago on Tuesday August 28, 2012 | Permalink
Post Creative
Member

Did anyone else come up with anything on this. I'm looking for approval workflow too.

It would be good to be able to set an additional status for the entry - currently you have read, unread, starred etc. I would like to be able to add to those and to be able to send out a notification (with custom text I define for that stage in the process) when the status is changed.

Posted 11 years ago on Saturday February 2, 2013 | Permalink
Chris Hajer
Key Master

There has not been any movement on this. If you'd like help with the customization, please consider posting on our job board. http://www.gravityhelp.com/forums/forum/job-board

Posted 11 years ago on Monday February 4, 2013 | Permalink

This topic has been resolved and has been closed to new replies.