Rejection justification for approval requests

On Approval Central or the AP:Show-Detail form, approvers can provide a justification for rejecting a request by entering some meaningful text in the Justification For Action field and clicking Reject.

The justification is stored as a note in the Approval Activity Log, and sent to:

• AP:Question-Comment-Info as a comment of the Justification type
• AP:Signature, from where the application can access it
• A field on the application form, if and as defined in the process

Currently, this feature is associated only with the Reject action. If an approver enters a justification and clicks any other action button, the request status changes as appropriate, but the text is not stored at any location.

The mandate for providing a justification is configurable at the process level. Process administrators can use the Rejection Justification area on the Configuration tab of the AP:Process Definition form to specify:

• whether an approver must provide a justification when rejecting a request
• the field on the application form in which the justification is stored

If justification is required, but the approver does not enter any text in the Justification For Action field on Approval Central before clicking Reject, the AP:Rejection Justification dialog box appears. The following events could occur:

• If the approver clicks Cancel, the following message is displayed:
  Cancelling the action, because the justification required by the current process was not provided. ARWARN 46408)
   The Reject action is cancelled, the request remains in the Pending state, and no log entry is created.
• If the approver clicks OK without entering some text in the Justification field, the following message is displayed:
  Please enter appropriate rejection justification. (ARNOTE 46409)
• If the approver provides some text and clicks OK, the request is rejected. The text is saved in AP:Question-Comment-Info as a comment of the Justification type. The justification also appears in the Activity Log.

Applications can also enable approvers to provide rejection justification on the three-way join form. To make this possible, application developers must:

• Add a Character field of unrestricted length (to accept more than 255 characters) on the three-way join form for an approver to enter the comment.
• Provide the workflow to push the comment onto the AP:Signature form after the approver clicks Reject.

If the process mandates a rejection justification, and the approver sets Approval Status to Rejected and saves the request without providing a justification, the Reject action fails. The following error is written to the approval log:

The processName process requires a rejection justification, which the approver failed to provide.

See Creating-the-join-forms and Approval-forms.

For general information about join forms, see Join-forms.