How can I enforce a reason before declining an approval?

[Kenny Peere]

For Service Request With Validation, our users have to fill in the email address of their approver (or select them from the list), who then gets an email with Approve or Decline button. The moment they click Decline, the ticket immediately transitions to Declined status. But I would need them to force them to provide a reason for declining.

I tried showing an input screen with a custom paragraph field "Decline reason" on the transition, and a validation that this field is not empty. But unfortunately this screen does not appear when they click the button and the transition occurs nonetheless.

Does anyone know any method to set this up correctly? Not necessarily via this exact construction, but any way to enforce a reason to decline.

[Marc -Devoteam-]

Hi @Kenny Peere 

Welcome to the community.

This is not possible, when using an approval flow, or even using transitions customers can trigger from the portal.

These transitions are done instantly.

Transition screens can only be used on transitions on the work item by a licensed user.

See also feature request JRACLOUD-96793 

[Gunjan Kumar]

Hi @Kenny Peere Welcome to the Atlassian Community
In JSM, when someone clicks Decline from the approval email, Jira can reject the request straight away without opening the usual screen, so it will not ask them to enter a decline reason and any required field or validator on that step can be skipped.aaa Atlassian says this is expected behaviour, so if you want to make the reason mandatory, the simplest built-in option is to collect it in a separate step before the request is fully declined. If you want the approver to be forced to type the reason directly from the email, that is not possible out of the box.

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

Hello and Welcome @Kenny Peere 

The approval action does not behave like a normal manual workflow transition.

So out of the box, the answer is basically no.

Your practical options are then more workaround-based either make it a process rule and ask approvers to comment first, or redesign it so they use a normal transition instead of the approval action, if that fits your setup better.