Delegation Framework for Approving Custom AWE

I am working on a custom AWE that I am building for a bolt-on Requisition component for implementing a third party recruiting system.  Here is a great resource for building your own custom AWE transaction.  Since the third party's system used a manual workflow, I recommended that we approve the requisitions in PeopleSoft, since AWE is such a powerful tool and can easily handle most workflow scenarios.  But when the user's asked for this new workflow to utilize Delegation Frame work, I had to do some research.  Since I was only tasked with configuring the transaction for approval, that is all I will be covering in this post.

First, you need to Register you transaction by navigating to Set Up HRMS>>Common Definitions>>Approvals>>Workflow Transactions.  Add a row to the Grid and configure your custom AWE transaction.  I used my AWE process id as the transaction Name, select a category and give it a description.

On the Details2 Tab associate your Process Id and configure the delegation options of Initiation and/or Approvals.  For this blog we are only configuring the Approval option.

 

Next we have to create a role that will grant the user access to the Approval component when they have been set a proxy. This role should be unique to the Delegation transaction you are configuring. PeopleSoft also recommends you follow a naming convention of "Delegate_".  But since we have a naming standard of "ZZ_HR" in our system, I went with "ZZ_HR_DELEGATE_REQ_APPR".       

Now we are ready to Configure our transaction for Delegation approval.  Navigate to Set Up HRMS>>Common Definitions>>Delegation>>Configure Transactions and Add a new value for our custom transaction, then enter our Delegate Role and the component used to approve our transaction.

  

Finally, navigate to your custom AWE transaction using Enterprise Components>>Approvals>>Approvals>>Transaction Configuration.  Once there add the HCSC_USER_UTILITIES application package and the UserUtilities path to the User Utilities configuration.

 Now your users can delegate approvals to your custom AWE process id. 

Excel to CI Utility

Last month I had the great pleasure of presenting the Excel to CI utility at the Collaborate Conference in Denver.  The utility is nothing more than a application engine that reads xml spreadsheet 2003 into a user defined staging record and maps that data into any CI you specify.  What sepeareates the utility from delivered Excel to CI is the ability to schedule the load, call CI methods while processing the transaction and controlling the order in which the data is processed into the CI.

Below is an example template that we used to adjust tax balances in 2012.  I like this example in particular because the component requires you to save the data in mid processing and then continue with the corrections.  To my knowledge Excel to CI would not handle this type of requirement.

The template also shows how you can hard code a value into the template, by using the equals and then typing the value you want to pass to the field in the CI. 

Below is the run control for the utility, it requires the user to specify the file they want to load and the Template Definition they want to use to parse and process the file.  Please note, that if the template has EMPLID mapped to a field in the CI, then the attached file must have a column with EMPLID in the first row.  All fields used by the template are required on the file.  And the first row of the spreadsheet is used to determine where the data exists.  This means if Column A Row 1 is EMPLID, then the utility is expecting all the data in Column A to be EMPLID's.  Also, don't attempt to hide data from the utility, it will find it and process all data that exists on the spreadsheet.  It will also evaluate every spreadsheet within the workbook, so if you only want to process the data in Sheet 1, then only upload a workbook with Sheet 1 in it.

 All Errors are returned in an xml spreadsheet 2003, that way you can easily reprocess the errors.

Feel free to down load the project and install it in your development environment and implemented in your production (at your own risk).  As the project has no custom objects, but please do compare the project to your target environment, so you don't accidently delete one of your own custom objects that just happened to have the same name as an object in the project. 


Down Load the Project