How to see who has not yet approved

[Elaine McMillan]

Hi, we are using a custom approver field which is auto-populated with multiple approvers. All approvers have to approve before the ticket moves to the next stage in the process. Is there a way that I can create a filer that shows either only the approvers who have yet to approve or that shows the status of all the listed approvers?

[Earl McCutcheon]

Hello @Elaine McMillan ,

On an issue directly the approval details will display a "Approved" label under the name of a user that has already approved an issue and will only show the name of a user if they have not yet approved.  Looking at the following screenshot my bottom test user has approved but my test user on the top has not:

As a list of issues goes you can get which issues have a pending approval and what approvers are listed on that issue using the JQL "approvals = pending()"  and adding the approver column to the list view, However there is no distinction between approval accepted for one user vs the other without, only that a approval is still pending for one or more of the listed approvers.  So you would still need to manually review the issue directly to see which user can not approved yet.

An alternative approach would be to look at pulling the data from the service desk API with a script to pull out the desired details from the result set.   I do not have a working example for the full process, but the following endpoint will give you all the approval details on an issue by issue basis:

• GET /rest/servicedeskapi/request/{issueIdOrKey}/approval

and you could use that in tandem with a JQL search to identify issues that are pending and pass the issue keys into the query above via:

• GET /rest/api/3/search?jql=approvals%20%3D%20pending()

Hope this helps

Regards,
Earl

[Elaine McMillan]

Thanks Earl. I was hoping that I could have a filter that showed the approvers who had not yet approved. Pulling the data is an option but I am not keen on having to go outside JSD in order to display or trigger and event. I had hoped I could stay within the product to get what I needed. 

[Earl McCutcheon]

Hi @Elaine McMillan ,

A possible workaround for you that would apply If you have a dedicated list of users that will always act as the approvers would be that you could use the JQL:

Approvals = pendingBy(userName)

This would require setting up a saved filter for each person in the approver's list and then creating a dashboard with a "Filter Results" gadget for each user's saved filter.

Hope this helps in your setup, but if the approver's list is dynamic you would need to create a saved filter for every user on your system as they could all potentially be in the list, and that would require a lot of overhead to keep in line with accurate data.

BUT this also comes with an additional caveat, as there is a BUG in the "myPending()" and "pendingBy()" JQL search terms currently that could throw a wrench the gears of this workaround, linked below.  The Bug is on our long term backlog and will be fixed but it's still a way out to get dedicated attention for a patch, So Until this bug is fixed you will get some conflicting results in the workaround noted above and the data will not be fully accurate:

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-5596

Regards,
Earl

[Elaine McMillan]

Thanks for the suggestion Earl. For now I have preset approvers but realistically we are moving fast and furious to allowing the approvers to be dynamic so I guess I will have to wait to see what direction approval tracking takes in JSD.