Struggling with Approvals/Approvers

Question

I've recently signed up to try out Service Management, and I'm struggling with approvals.  I've been reading other questions/answers around it but haven't quite grasped something.

I have a request type that users the Service Request with Approvals. That request type already comes with a hidden Approvals.

I've added an approvals option to the workflow of a specific request type to 'include approval step' > Jira field Approvers

What I'm stuggling is how to set the user(s) that is the approver for this request type.  Other posts I've seen show the Approvers field with an EDIT option, but my screen does not allow the editing of a default, only the option to move it's position.

This post says there is an edit button to add default users

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/set-up-a-pre-set-list-of-approvers/

But that edit option is not available to me.

When a test request is submitted, the agent has the option of picking a user for approval but I'd like to be able to set a default on new requests not have the agent have to pick the approver.

I've obviously missed something as a newbie, because examples I've seen show the approval field against a request type as having an EDIT option.

paulcreedy · Answer

Finally I think I've got it working.

It was a really stupid mistake on my part.  Whilst the custom field does work, and it's useful for having a custom naming field it also lead me to the simple solution as to how the pre-existing approvers field can also be used.

The reason I couldn't edit the default approvers for the field, was because....I hadn't clicked the edit button further up the screen!!!  It was as simple as that, and a user error on my part for not noticing.

Brant, thank you for your answer as it lead me on a path to find the solution

paulcreedy · Answer

Cheers Brant

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

I have stumbled upon that article but discounted it because it mentions:

Quote:

"By default, your service project comes with an Approvers field for adding individual approvers, and an Approver groups field for adding groups of approvers. You might create more custom fields if your workflow has more than one approval step, or if you want the field to have a different name in the issue view"

I don't have more than one approval step, I just need the one step with a default, and that article says that the service project already has an approvers field, which it does, but I can't edit it unlike the screenshots in some articles showing that field with an Edit option.

Do I remove the default Approvers field that's already there and make a custom one instead?  If so, what's the purpose of the existing default one?

Am I missing something else in the understanding of how this works?

Thanks again

Paul

Brant Schroeder · Answer

@paulcreedy Welcome to the Atlassian community.  The article you shared has a link at the top to create a custom field.  You will need to do this so you can add it to the request type and set the value when the issue is created.  You can learn how to add the custom field here:  https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/add-a-new-custom-field-to-a-project/  This is also for a company managed project.  If you are using a team managed project you will want to use this information instead: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/how-are-approvals-used-in-team-managed-projects/