Appclusive provides a freely configurable 16 level approval process (which means, you can implement a 32-eye approval with that - enough for most use cases we can think of).

An Approval is a mechanism that can be defined to control certain interactions of users such as Order Processes. Approvals will then suspend the respective process or action and wait until the Approver will Approve or Decline the Approval. Only when an Approval is Approved the corresponding process or action will be resumed and execution can continue.

ApprovalTypes

Approvals can be of one of the following types:

1. AutoApprove
2. AutoDecline

AutoApprove

An Approval of this type will set its Status to Approved when no action has been taken by the Approver and either AbsoluteExpiration or RelativeExpiration has expired. In that case the Approval will continue as if the Approver had Approved the Approval.

AutoDecline

An Approval of this type is the opposite of the former and will set its Status to Declined when no action has been taken by the Approver and either AbsoluteExpiration or RelativeExpiration has expired. In that case the Approval will terminate as if the Approver had Declined the Approval.

Expiration

An Approval can hold either of the following expiration values:

1. AbsoluteExpiration
2. RelativeExpiration

AbsoluteExpiration

With this expiration option, the Approval will expire at a specified DateTimeOffset expressed in Ticks (where each Tick is a 100ns interval). An example could be the end of a year, such as 2018-01-01, which would be 636503616000000000 ticks.

RelativeExpiration

With this expiration option, the Approval will expire after a specified TimeRange expressed in Ticks (where each Tick is a 100ns interval) which is calculated from the time the Approval was created. A typical example for this might be an approval that should be cancelled (i.e. Declined) after 4 weeks without being Approved, which would be 24192000000000 ticks.

Hint: an easy way to calculate Ticks is to use PowerShell and [timespan]::FromDays(3) or one of the other static methods:

Name             Definition
----             ----------
FromDays         static timespan FromDays(double value)
FromHours        static timespan FromHours(double value)
FromMilliseconds static timespan FromMilliseconds(double value)
FromMinutes      static timespan FromMinutes(double value)
FromSeconds      static timespan FromSeconds(double value)

Configuration

Approvals can be configured via global attributes which can be defined on the following entities:

1. Tenant
2. Organisational Unit (OU)
3. Catalogue
4. CatalogueItem
5. Blueprint / Model