Can I resend notifcations to approvers?

[Melody Baughman]

We are utilizing the approval process in Service Desk for the first time. The approver can't find the email notification and we want to resend it to him. What is the process for this?

[Dirk Ronsmans · Accepted solution]

Hi @Melody Baughman ,

I don't think you can easily resend the emails (without having some sort of reminder process that you trigger manually) 

but normally when the approver goes to the general portal they should see it under "my requests"/"my approvals".

[Melody Baughman]

@Dirk Ronsmans -

Thanks! For the short term I'll direct the user there. If I can ask another question: Now that I'm looking I don't think the system sent him a message in the first place. We're new to the approval feature of Jira, so I'm wondering if our configuration is incorrect. Any suggestions on how to check that?

[Dirk Ronsmans]

The first thing you can check is under "project settings > customer notifications"

There you should find a "Approval Required" rule (When a request transitions to an approval stage of its workflow, your service desk notifies approvers that they must act on the request.)

If that is there you can go through the logs.

You can check is (in application logs) the atlassian-jira-outgoing-mail.log file.

Before you go on a wild goose chase through your entire configuration looking for something that might be nothing,

On the other hand, are other mails being sent out? (cause you can turn of the outgoing emails globally as well)

[Melody Baughman]

Other mail is being sent out (I can see the log of emails going out to customers on their tickets) and the rule for approval required is enabled. But there is no log for when the email was sent to the approver.

We transitioned this ticket to an approval type and added the approver. Maybe I have that in the wrong order?

Again, thanks for the help. 

[Dirk Ronsmans]

@Melody Baughman ,

There isn't actually a lot of information you can find about that. The notification itself reads as 

When a request transitions to an approval stage of its workflow, your service desk notifies approvers that they must act on the request.

So for me I read that as it will only send out the email/notification when the issue is transitioning. When the issue is already on the Approval stage but the Approver is added (manually) later I'm thinking the email is not sent out (again).

I'm not a 100% sure on thisone but it seems reasonable to me since manually adding the approver when it's already pending might send out multiple emails if you have multiple approvers so i can see why they would not do that.

It's a use case I will need to test myself but if it works for you when you have the approver there before transitioning to the approval stage and it works I feel this would be the cause. 

Sidenote: afaik there is no "issue updated" listener so changing the approver would fire a generic event so that's harder to capture. There are apps (like Email This Issue or Scriptrunner) which have a listener on "issue updated" so depending on your needs you could look in to those!

[Melody Baughman]

@Dirk Ronsmans 

I was afraid that might be the case. Thank you for walking me through this. I'll conduct a couple of test cases and see what I need to do in the future. I appreciate all the help :)