Approvals engine

Business context

Generally enterprise applications require multiple people to review a certain process or an artifact and approve it before it can be published or made generally available.

Depending upon multiple rules, there could be multiple levels of approvals required.

Overview

This is a sample angular based proof of concept to demostrate a simple Approvals engine functionality that demonstrates Multi stage approvals

Samples

• newclient.yaml - simple multistage workflow with no parameters and sequencial approval stages

• newclientfintrans.yaml - complex multistage workflow with conditional branches

Any given workflow template consists of following components:

• parameters
  These are input parameters passed by the calling application that can be used for evaluating the a given stage for navigating to the next stages

• stages
  Every stage in a workflow further consists of following

  • code
    Code to uniquely identify a stage in the workflow. (Used when defining next_stages)

  • title
    Display name of the current stage

  • approverGroups
    one or more group (group of people) that can be approve the current stage

  • next
    list of next possible stages.
    Depending upon the condition to evaluate the next stage is selected.

NOTE: Every workflow template should have atleast 1 Stage marked as INITIAL and one or more stages marked as FINAL

Defining conditions for next-stage

Following set of condition operators are supported

• CONSTANT
  Match a specific constant value

• PARAMETER
  Use the workflow parameter (explained above) value for evaluating the condition. Typically used in combination of CONSTANT

• BINARY
  This is a connector between 2 or more conditions. Currently support 2 operators

  • EQ equality operator
  • IN evaluates if left field is in the right list

  e.g. client_code EQ MSFT

• COMPLEX
  This type enables users to build as complex a condition as needed by using combination of above condition types by using one of the below connectors

  • AND - all conditions should be satisfied to proceed to next stage
  • OR - any one condition should be satified to proceed to next stage

  e.g. (client_code EQ ABC ) AND (division_code IN [ MUMBAI,PUNE,SYDNEY,MELBOURNE ] )

• ANY
  This is a catch all condition which always passed.

NOTE: There could be one or more conditional branches. The sequence of evaluation of each of the conditional branch depends on the priority set for the given condition