User assignments and their context in terms of absences

mhoffmann

Hi there!

We currently have a situation with a customer where we took over an invoice workflow with several approval layers. These approval layers are all user-based but the layers imply some sort of higher hierarchy - e.g.

Layer 1: Basically everyone who's allowed to order on behalf of the company can be chosen as an approver.
Layer 2: Only a few employees can be chosen as an approver. (basically all "higher ups").

The main issue we have here that we cannot assign the user's tasks to the role itself, because that would imply that every user of this layer can see the task which is obviously not what you'd want with an approval process where the approval is and should be user-based.

However, the main issue we currently have is that the substitution in case of absences can only be chosen for the user, not for any context because Axon Ivy has no concept with user assignments that a user is executing this task in the role of layer 1 or layer 2 because this is defined by the process, not any task assignment, and sadly, the customer does not have same hierarchy substitutes for every approver leading to an undermining of these layers which is not wanted.

I know that Axon Ivy 12 does support multiple security members as activator, yet, I still don't think this would solve this particular issue because then it would still be assigned to the role which is just a user container for a select and not a real role intended to be used as activator.

Knowing, that I could to everything manually (implement an absence dialog which would heed the process step one task is currently in and then reassign the task), I do not think this is something I should be doing.

Does anyone here has a good idea how to solve this to satisfy the customer's need without having to rewrite the whole absence management to include the process step?

My best guess currently is some sort of cronjob or hook on the absences which would check for a role substitute and then delegates (?) the task, but this would be prone to be bad because as soon as the original activator returns, it's not assigned to him and therefore I'd also had to implement the reassignment in case of an absence.

I think that some sort of context to an user assignment might be a good addition to the Axon Ivy platform, e.g. "user function" or "user role" - but I also understand that this is a very specific and not necessarily generic requirement.

Thanks for your input!

Reto Weiss

Hi @mhoffmann

Summerizing your problem: You want to assign a task to a role that has one user (e.g., role = HeadOfHumanResource, user = Claudia), then you want to define a substitute for Claudia for her Role HeadOfHumanResource (e.g., substitute = Daniela). Now, if not absent, Claudia sees all the tasks that are assigned to HeadOfHumanResource. Daniela does not see them. If Claudia is absent also Daniela sees the tasks assigned to HeadOfHumanResource and can work on them too.

Is that correct?

If so, you can also use the Axon Ivy Portal to configure a substitute for a role a user owns. Also, you can use the method IUser#createSubstitue to configure such a substitution.

Regards
Reto Weiss, Product Owner Axon Ivy Core

mhoffmann

Reto Weiss

Hi Reto,

that was not what I wanted to describe, but I can understand that my wall of text was a bit overkill to describe the issue at its core, I try it again:

Think of an invoice approval - you have two roles - let's say Approver 1 and Approver 2. These roles are just used as user container for a select - so during your approval process, you have to pick one user out of each group which will be the working user for the given task (approval 1, approval 2) - the workflow has the context information provided by the process chain and knows which function a user currently has due to the step, but the engine itself has no further context for the user assignment; it just sees an user assigned task.

And this is problematic for one specific customer and I can fully understand their point: For them, the approvers have a different level of trust within the company and there is just no real substitute for several users which can fulfill both functions (approver 1 and approver 2) rendering the user substitution not suitable for them in some cases.

I believe it's a mixture of an organisational "issue" and a real issue with the way approval processes are usually programmed within Axon Ivy. A role assignment would circumvent this, but given that the roles are containers only, it would undermine the approval logic completely.

The core issue: Ivy substitution only works per user, but I need substitution per user-in-role-context (e.g. Claudia as Approver 1 has Bowser as substitute, but Claudia as Approver 2 has Peach).

And this is just where I struggle to implement it without rewriting too much of the logic Axon Ivy already provides.
A role assignment cannot be performed here and with temporary roles, it would most likely be too overkill.

To come to a clear requirement - what I'd need is something like:

task.activator = claudia
task.activatorContextRole = approver1

The activatorContextRole's substitute can then be handled by the substitute for the role assignment.

I think this sums it up pretty well.