Approvals

Modified on Thu, 10 Jul at 9:37 AM

The approvals solution allows you to create approval workflows for your forms. This ensures that any form submissions are approved by a specified approver before any submission events are triggered.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Configure your approvals app
Flows
Approval Applet
Additional Notes
Approve, Seek Clarification, Deny
Approval Administration
Require MFA

Configure your approvals app

Open the solutions menu and click manage on the Approvals card.

Summary

In the summary tab you can style and customise your Approvals Applet

Details - The title and tagline of your application that will be displayed when opening your app, as well as the link to open your Approvals Applet.

Email Sending - This is the email address that will be used to send emails to your approvers.

Colour Theme - This allows you to customise your application's Primary and Accent colours.

Logo - This is the icon used for the Approvals application.

Approvers

Here you can add, remove and filter your approvers. An approver must be added to this list before they can be used in your approval flows.

Once added your approvers will receive an email with a temporary password, they will need to use this to login before setting a new password.

Groups

An approver can be added to one or more approval groups.

Approvals must be part of an approval group to receive approvals, as approval steps and concurrent steps are set at the group level.

If you want to send an approval to a specific user simply create a group for that one approver and assign it to the approval step.

Group Managers and Administrators

Group Managers and Administrators can access the Administration menu, see more on the Administration menu below.

Group Managers can manage approvals that have been assigned to their group.

Administrators can manage all approvals.

SAML Integration

Approvers can also authenticate using a SAML provider such as Active Directory and Auth0.

To do this, open the Approval Apps, Approvers tab and turn on the SAML integration. If you are using Entra ID or Auth0, you can follow the steps on the screen. To ensure your users have access to the correct approvals, you will need to map the configured group name to your SAML user claims.

SAML Groups

Once SAML is enabled on your Approvals app, you will need to configure your Groups. Please note that if you are changing from using usernames and passwords to using SAML authentication, your existing groups will not carry over as SAML groups. To ensure that you do not need to modify any existing form approval flows, create your SAML groups with the same name as your existing groups.

Click the Edit Groups button and start adding your groups.

Group Name: This is the name of your group and what will be displayed when selecting which group to assign an approval step to.
Notification Email Addresses: You must add at least one notification email address; this is the email that will be notified when new approvals are assigned to the group.
Group Manager & Administrator: When using SAML authentication, you can use the out-of-the-box group manager (oneblink:manager) and administrator claims (oneblink:administrator). Alternatively, you can grant those same permissions to any SAML group by checking the corresponding box.

SAML Groups Mapping

When using SAML to authenticate your approvals users, you will need to ensure that the SAML claims include a "groups" claim. This will need to be a comma-separated string including all of the groups the user has access to. In the example below, using Entra ID, I have created the "groups" claim and mapped it to the user.department attribute.

In the user.deparment attribute I have included a comma-separated string that matches my group names configured within the OneBlink console "support,reviewer,oneblink:adminisrator". I have also included the oneblink:administrator group to ensure the user has access to the administrator privilages.

Flows

The approval flow is configured in the form workflow tab

Approval Applet

You can open the approval applet using the OPEN SOLUTION button on the solution page of the console.

You will need to have a valid approver record to log in to the applet.

Once you have logged in you will be able to see a list of your current pending approval, approvals that are requiring clarification and approvals where the clarification has been received.

From your approval applet, you can manage all the approvals that have been assigned to you. You can filter the approvals by status to find the approvals that are important to you.

Search and Filter

The Approvals App has a Search bar allowing you to find the specific Approval you are looking for. The Search bar will search on form name, submission title, submission Id, and External Id.

You can also use the filters to customise your view so that you only see the approvals that are important to you. You can filter by step ensuring you are only seeing specific approval steps, you can filter on status such as awaiting approval or clarification requested to help limit your list of approvals and you can filter by payment to display only the approvals that have an associated payment.

Additional Notes

Approvers can include additional notes at any point in the approval process. There is no limit to the number of notes or the amount of information that can be added to notes. Approvers can add notes to steps that are assigned to their group. Approvers can also modify are delete notes from any approver in their group.

Approve, Seek Clarification, Deny

These are the 3 options currently offered for OneBlink Approval flows.

Approve

When the approver clicks the approve button they can add notes and optionally notify the submitted that the form has been approved.

If you choose to notify the submitted the email address will automatically populate if the user was authenticated when they submitted the form. If the user was not authenticated then the email address will need to be copied from the form submission. If the user was not authenticated and did not include their email address in the form then the submitter was anonymous and can not be contacted.

Seek Clarification

If seeking clarification is selected you are passing a note back to the original submitted. In this case, the submitter will need to be known. Once the notes and email address have been added you can click CONFIRM.

This will email the original submitter with a link to the form pre-filled with their initial submission data.

The email body will also include your note, specifying what requires clarification.

Deny

Similar to approval you have the option of including a note, however in this case the note will be included in the Deny email back to the original submitter. If the submission is made anonymously then the submitter cannot be contacted the approval is removed from your approval list.

Approval Administration

Allow your administrators and group managers to view, filter and manager approvals.

In the Administrator menu, administrators will have access to all approvals, including ones that were conditionally skipped.

Filters

Change your filters to find the approvals you are looking for

Submitted After - All approvals submitted after this date time (default to 12 am the previous day)
Submitted Before - All approvals submitted before this date time
Last Updated After - All approvals updated after this date time
Last Updated Before - All approvals updated before this date time
Last Updated By - Search on your approvers to find all approvals that were last updated by that approval user
Form - filter your different flows to see only the ones that were submitted for a specific form
Status - filter on the status of the submission
External Id - Search for a specific External Id
Submission Id - Search for a specific Submission Id

Show History

From here you can see all of the actions that have occurred for this approval, including any private or public notes added at each step in the flow. You can also access the historic and most recent submissions of the form.

Sometimes submissions that have been approved, denied, or conditionally skipped need to be changed. To accommodate this we have included the ability to Reopen, Deny or Approve any completed approval.

Reopen

If an approval has been completed an administrator can send the form back to the original submitted for clarification. This will send an email to the specified email address, containing a link that will open the form and pre-fill it with all of the previously submitted data.

Deny

If an approval has been completely approved, an administrator can choose to deny the approval. Clicking the Deny button will bring up the deny pop-up the same as if it was clicked on the approvals home page. The administrator can then add any notes and choose to notify the person who submitted the form.

Approve

If any step of an approval is denied an administrator can choose instead to approve it. This will move the approval onto its next step. If it is the last step of the approval, then the administrator will have the option to add notes and notify the person who submitted the form.

Email Preferences

To modify your email subscriptions you can click your profile icon in the top right of the screen and select preferences. From here you can manage the emails you receive. By default, these will be turned on.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) ro two-factor authentication (2FA), is a best practice that requires a second authentication factor in addition to a user name and password sign-in credentials. We strongly recommend enabling MFA to enhance your account security.

To enable MFA, navigate to the Preferences screen in the Approvals app then select the profile icon in the top right corner of the screen.

Then select Preferences:

Select Setup MFA:

Authentication uses an authenticator app like Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator to generate one-time passwords. Follow the steps included in the MFA set-up to configure your authenticator app and start using MFA to securely log in to the approval platform.

Upon completion, the Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) configuration should display as enabled.

Require MFA

Requiring MFA ensures all Approvers must have MFA configured. To enable this option, it is located in the Approvers tab of the Approvals menu. Please note that to configure this setting you will need to have the App Users: Manager permissions, and to disable this setting you will need to contact support.

Get Help

If you have any questions or would like assistance with setting up your Approvals Workflow please contact us via this support portal or email support@oneblink.io. We are happy to assist in any way we can.