Approval Central

The Approval Central form, which acts as a console for the approval server, appears when you log in to AR System. Access Approval Central from the AR System Home page as shown in the following image:

Quickly review approval requests that are awaiting your attention on Approval Central. These could be direct requests or requests for which you act as an alternate approver. You can approve, reject, hold, or view the details of a pending request by using the appropriate buttons provided in the following Approval Central form:

You can act on single or multiple requests at one time without opening each request individually. If the administrator set the Can Reassign option for the corresponding approval process to Yes in the AP:Process Definition form, you can reassign a pending request.

The Pending Approvals table appears by default, and it displays requests that have the Pending, Hold, or More Information status. The left pane of the Approval Central console contains two sections: Summary and Actions. Click a link in these sections to display a corresponding panel in the right pane.

Requesters use Approval Central to access More Information requests sent to them. See Processing-approval-requests.

To open Approval Central from the AR System home page

If your administrator has configured Approval Server, the AR System home page form will contain a link to Approval Central. 

1. Log in to Mid Tier.
2. On the home page, select Quick Links > Approval Central link to open Approval Central.
   For more information, see Configuring-the-Approval-Server.

To open Approval Central in a browser

1. Launch your browser and go to http://<hostName:portNumber>/arsys/forms/<serverName>/Approval Central where hostName:portNumber is the location of the web server where Mid Tier is running, and serverName is the name of the AR System server where Approval Server is running.
   Ask your AR System server administrator for the exact URL.
2. In the Mid Tier login window, enter your user name and password, along with an authentication string, if necessary, and click Log In.
   You can use a similar procedure to access any other Approval Server forms, such as the AP:Administration form.

Summary fields

The links in the Summary section of Approval Central correspond to predefined searches. The corresponding panel on the right displays the search results in a tabular format. The following image shows a sample Summary section:

The following table provides information about the tabs in the Summary section:

Actions field

The link in the Actions section of Approval Central opens the AP:Alternate form. Use this form to specify the users who can approve requests if an approver is not available. The following image shows a sample Actions section:

Pending Approvals table

In Approval Central, in the right pane, the Pending Approvals panel displays requests with the Pending, Hold, and More Information status.

As an approver, use the information in this dashboard to understand and approve requests according to the urgency of the request. The following image shows the panel for Pending Approvals:

In the first column, some rows might display a bell icon, indicating that the corresponding request is Urgent. The second untitled column contains check boxes that you can use to select the corresponding requests. Use the check boxes to select multiple requests on which you want to perform similar actions.

When you select requests and click Approve, Reject, or Hold the status of these requests is updated. Refresh the page to view the updated status for these requests. 

When you click a row-level icon without explicitly selecting the row, the row gets selected first. The following table provides information about the columns and icons in the Approval Search Result table:

Approval Search

The Approval Search window enables you to specify criteria for searching through approval requests. Select or enter field values in this section of the form to search for requests and display the results in the Search Results table.

Perform approval searches by choosing Basic Search or Advanced Search. The following table briefly describes Basic Search and Advanced Search:

The following table describes the fields in the Advanced Search for Approval Search:

Approval Search Result table

When you search for certain approval requests by using the links in the Summary section or by running a basic or an advanced search, the Approval Search Result table is displays the results in the right pane of Approval Central screen. 

Use this result table to view all the approval requests that match your search and take action as required. 

In the first column, some rows might display a bell icon, which indicates that the approval request is urgent. The second untitled column contains check boxes that you can use to select the corresponding requests. The following image shows a sample search result table:

When you click Approve, Reject, or Hold, the status of the selected requests changes. These modified requests continue to appear in the Pending Approvals table until the table is refreshed, or until you navigate to another page or link.The following table provides information about the fields in Approval Search Result table:

 Working with multiple pending requests

You can select multiple requests and change the status. When you click the appropriate action button, the changes are made to all the requests. If one or more of the associated processes for the selected action require passwords, you are prompted to provide them once, before the action is performed.

At a time only one row appears highlighted regardless of the status of its check box. Multiple row selection does not work for requests of the Needs Attention category.

• To select a single row in the Approval Requests table, click anywhere on the row. The check box of that row is selected.
• To select multiple requests, use the corresponding check boxes.
• To select all the requests in this table, select the check box in the table header.

Setting display preferences on Approval Central

Use the following options from the Preferences menu to set display preferences for the approval request tables:

• Add Column— Select a column to be displayed.
• Remove Column— Select a column to be hidden.
• Set Refresh Interval—Click to open a dialog box in which you can specify the duration (in minutes) after which the table is automatically refreshed.
• Reset—Click to revert any changes you made to the appearance of the table or the refresh interval.
• Save—Click to save any changes you made to the appearance of the table or the refresh interval.
  These changes are saved only for the current session and are not retained when you log out.

 Action buttons

You can select one or more requests on Approval Central and click the appropriate buttons to perform actions. The buttons are disabled only if there are no requests to be selected.

Selecting one or more requests enables all the action buttons regardless of the status of the request. If a certain action cannot be performed on a selected request, one of the following occurs:

• Clicking the action button has no effect. For example, if you select a request that is on hold, clicking the Hold button will have no effect.

• Clicking the action button displays an error message and the request remains unchanged. For example, if you select an request with the Approved, Rejected, or Error status and click Approve, Reject, Hold, or Reassign, the following error message is displayed:

  Select at least one row with appropriate status to perform the buttonLabel action. (ARERR errorNumber)

The following table describes the action buttons available for the selected requests:

 Request Details

The Request Details section displays all the data related to an approval request. This data is fetched from the AP:Show-Detail form. For more information, see Form-to-view-history-of-activities-on-a-request-for-an-approval-process.  For information about the approval request details, see AP:Detail form.

When you click the Approve, Reject, Hold, or Reassign icons, a dialog box prompts you to enter your password. The statuses of the selected requests are changed only if you provide a valid password; otherwise, an error message is displayed.

More Information section

Use the More Information section to add questions or comments to the current request in a table. The following image shows an example of this section:

To modify or delete questions or comments associated with the current request, you must go to the Activity Log tab on the AP:Show-Detail form. For more information, see Form-to-view-history-of-activities-on-a-request-for-an-approval-process. 

The following table describes the fields available in More Information:

Troubleshooting the sequence diagram display

When you click the Approval Details icon on the Approval Central form, if the AP:Show-Detail form does not load the sequence diagram, the rendering continues or the following error is displayed: Error during loading document.

To fix this issue, perform the following steps:

1. Open the Visualizer Module Registration form.
2. Click Search.
3. Select the Approval Server record that has an attachment of the Approval_0.jar or Approval.jar file.
4. Delete the attachment and add the Approval_0.jar or Approval.jar file again.
5. Restart Mid Tier.
6. Stop the Apache Tomcat service.
7. From the Mid Tier Install folder, delete the contents in the PluginCache folder.
8. Start the Tomcat service and open the Approval Central form.
9. Select a request and click the Approval Details icon.

You can see the sequence diagram without errors.

For more information, see Approving-and-rejecting-requests-from-Approval-Central.