task approval issue?

[lee mcdermott]

Hi,

 

i am just wondering if there have been any system changes overnight?

something was working yesterday and today it no longer works as it was.

Please see 2 screen shots below.

Yesterday - Roseanne who is a member of 1st line team would process these calls - the call was automatically assigned to team "Mobile" - she assigned to user hornbillmobile which generated a task for approval.

Yesterday when she did this the task was created and assigned to herself which meant she could actually process the task and complete it even though the call was assigned to a different team and user.

 

As of today when she performs exactly the same steps the task is no longer assigned to her but to the user hornbillmobile in the mobile team - so she no longer has permission to the task so cannot process it.

 

This also seems to be happening on other calls assigned to different teams?

 

Any ideas if anything has changed as I have not made any amendments to the BP's or the Human tasks that are created?

 

thanks

 

lee

we have an issue where

[nasimg]

Hornbill do updates (not the patches we apply as customers) in the background, you can get visibility of these by adding your email address (application setting I need to find). I got the below email this morning - this doesn't mean your instance got updated but likely (although this may not have caused your issue).

From: Hornbill Updates [mailto:updates@hornbill.com]
Sent: 06 July 2017 01:06
To: Gani, Nasim Nasim.Gxxx@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Hornbill Update Notification : LIVENODE4

 

An automatic software update was applied to your instance 'lbdigitalservices' at 2017-07-06 00:05:47Z, the update was completed and is now running build 2778. The service was suspended for a total of 26 seconds during the update process.

[nasimg]

Location for getting these notifications: 

Admin - System - Settings - Advance, search for autoUpdate.notifyOnUpdate. Add you email address and when Hornbill autoupdate, you'll get a notification. They usually happen around 1am.

[Guest Ehsan]

Hi @lee mcdermott,

Apologies for the inconvenience that this is causing. To help us investigate this further and identify the cause, could you please describe the Business Process; more specifically the flow that generates the task. Is the Business Process creating a Human Task or an Authorisation? Is it using the Variable Picker to pick the assignee?

Thanks,

Ehsan

[lee mcdermott]

@nasimg

thanks nasimg that is useful to know.

[lee mcdermott]

Hi @Ehsan

see screen shot - it is a human task - but I cannot ever remember it being configured like this for the assign to?

 

Maybe it was but I don't think it was? This area does look different as if it has changed - thought it was maybe due to the changes in the BPM processing and publishing stuff?

the process is basically waiting for an owner - so when assigned to someone it generated the human task to say if it has been approved or not?

 

 

[Guest Ehsan]

Hi @lee mcdermott,

The Business Process looks OK to me - A task is created and is assigned to the owner of a Request using the Variable Picker option. I've attempted to recreate this issue within a Hornbill instance and I'm unable to recreate the reported behaviour; The task is correctly assigned to the owner of the Request in my example. Although, I have applied the latest update of the Service Manager App (build 997). I can see the Service Manager App on your instance is on build 979. Could you update the Service Manager App on your instance and give it another try? We can then confirm if this was an issue that was addressed in a previous build. 

Thanks,

Ehsan

[lee mcdermott]

@Ehsan

 

thanks, yeah I will update the system.

 

I'm not sure if someone has answered this before, but these activities are now assigned to a particular user, is there any way someone else can process them? I have added myself to that team and still don't have permission to do this, if that person is off or unavailable I don't see anyway we can ever process it.

I have nearly every role added but still don't seem to have permission to do it?

(i don't have super user role as was advised not to have this role)

 

thanks

 

lee

[Guest Ehsan]

@lee mcdermott,

Just reading back on this post again - Within the Business Process, the configuration for the Human Task that you provided a screenshot for, uses the Variable Picker to set the task's assignee to the owner of the Request. In your example, that would "hornbillmobile". If the owner of the Request was "Roseanne", then the task would be assigned to her. This behaviour is expected.

This can then be driven by two possibilities:

• The assignee of the Human Task used to be set to "Roseanne" by default, using the User option rather than the Variable Picker option in the Human Task configuration. The Business Process has since been updated to assign the Activity to the owner of the Request.
• Roseanne used to assign a Request to herself and then action on the Activity before re-assigning the Request to "hornbillmobile".

In relation to completing an Activity on behalf of another User - You can achieve this by enabling "app.experimental.advancedRequestTaskCompleter" Application Setting in the Service Manager App and as long as you're granted a Full Access role (e.g. Incident Management Full Access) or the Service Desk Admin role, you'll be able to action on them. More details on this option can be found in the following Wiki page:

• https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Service_Manager_Experimental_Features

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Ehsan

[lee mcdermott]

@Ehsan

 

Yes I thought when she described what was happening I though how it was now should be how it should work  - i.e. she assigned to a person in that team they became the owner of the activity. Which is what it is doing now.

however the initial confusion was it was making her the owner of the activity even when she assigned the call to the person in the team. As per your 2 possibilities I had thought that but as you can see in the screen shots she was assigning to that person yet she became the owner. that is why I thought something had changed system wise that may have caused the bp to somehow change from whatever it was configured to to the variable ownerid?

 

Experimental feature - Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work as it is already enabled. I added myself as a member of the team the call is assigned to and I still couldn't complete the activities? I'm not sure if I am missing something?

As a work around to allow some of our first line staff to be able to process activities - I have created a new role and assigned them to that role and when the activity is created get it to be assigned to that role rather than the ownerID which then gives them permission to process it. This seems to work.

 

lee

[Guest Ehsan]

@lee mcdermott,

The Variable Picker provides variables from other Automated Tasks in a Business Process depending on the design of your workflow. The variables are produced as the result of a sequence of Automated Task and you'll have to manually pick a variable in a Human Task, otherwise the Server does not recognise "ownerId" as a default variable. This then makes it unlikely for the Server update to perform such breaking change.

Regarding the experimental feature - Are you a member of a team that supports the Service that the Request is raised against? Please refer to "Supporting Teams" section of the Service.

[lee mcdermott]

@Ehsan

 

all our services are set to be supported by all teams. So i thought this should work?

[Guest Ehsan]

@lee mcdermott,

I can see that you've updated to most recent update of the Service Manager App. Here's how I configured my Services to provide me with the option to complete another member's Activity...

I created a simple Business Process that creates a Human Task and assigns it to the owner of the Request.

Against a Service called "General Support", I selected the Business Process from the Workflow field against the Incident's configuration.

I'm logged in as Ehsan. I raised a Request and assigned to another member of my team - James Ainsworth in this example.

Have you enabled "Allow Task View" and "Allow Task Action" options for your account's membership against the Organisation record?

I can see the "Complete" button when I open the Activity through the Request page.

I'm assigned the following Application Roles. To be specific, we're interested in "Incident Management Full Access" for an Incident.

I also confirmed that the following Application Setting is enabled.

I hope you could use the steps above, to determine what could be missing?

[lee mcdermott]

@Ehsan

 

thanks. I will check through, I think all is set correct but I will do a little bit of testing to confirm.

thanks

 

lee