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Critical Bug: Workflows stall if ticket fields change while awaiting approval


Userlevel 1
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Hi, 

we face a regression bug since December 2022 (reported via our consultant back then) and since it wasn’t fixed yet I wanted to see how others deal with it and if someone might have foudn a good workaround.

The issue:

  • If a Service Request requiring approval isn’t approved instantly by the manager, but a field in the ticket changes meanwhile (manually, or by another workflow), the workflow doesn’t continue any longer after the approval
  • Hence: SRs never reach the status approved
  • In our case we filter away unapproved SRs from our agents to not distract them and close them after several days of pending approval with a supervisor rule. That closed several approved SRs

Our workaround for now:

  • If tickets don’t reach the approved state in days, we put them in a “check manually approval” state for our agents
  • Drawbacks: It’s more manual work for our agents, productivity drops. Plus approved Service Requests might hang around for a couple of days till the work on them proceeds, which weakens our achievable service quality.

Since the ETA for the bugfix was postponed and takes longer than the (usually fast) fixes from Freshworks, I wanted to see how others cope with it.

 

Cheers,

Andy

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Best answer by Daniel Söderlund 7 March 2023, 08:23

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Userlevel 7
Badge +13

As befor the approval blocked any other WFA to run we created 2 WFA one for sending out the approval and no other node after that action second was to act when the ticket was approved. 

I haven’t tested if this big affect our solution. 

I created one WFA that acts on both create and approved but with the same mindset that the WFA ends after the approval is sent out and having a custom number field that counts up if there are several approval stakeholders. 

 

Thanks for the heads up 

Userlevel 1
Badge +4

Hey Daniel,

 

thanks, never dared to let the workflow end right after sending out the approval ;) After your hint I found the trigger conditions for the changed approval state from includes X to includes Y.

When I tried first steps if that could work out I figured out the bug seems silently gone. I haven’t reproduced it myself for weeks, after we reported it and got it confirmed, but for now it seems it was fixed or the bug vanished. At least I wasn’t able to repro in the past days :) 

Still we might rebuild our approval workflows to “your” method at some point. It seems to give us more control.

 

Cheers,

Andy

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