What we ended up doing was making a distribution group email address a requester in the system. If you already have members in the distribution group you just need to let them know to ignore the activation email that freshservice sends out.

Did you then just reference that special “Requester” when sending the approval in your action node? Did that trump the setting that approvals from Employee Onboarding will be sent to “Reporting Manager” and “Department Head”?

@zachary.king I see my mistake, we use distribution lists to create messages from our automation, but we do not send approvals out that way, so my solution would not fit this problem. 

@keefe.andrews and @zachary.king thanks for the suggestion and follow up.  A couple of things that I have tried:

1. Hard coding an email address in the action item.  It looks like the action gets fired when the ticket is created but the email is never sent (or received).  Even though the ticket will record that it was.
2. I tried having a task created when the service request was raised that would then send the approval email.  Again with the To address hard coded.  This failed as well.  

   

3. I have tried creating Custom Objects with the approval emails as variables in the object.  But I’m not able to get the action to see the read-in variable.  I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong here but I also doubt this will work.  

   

   If anyone has other ideas, I’m open to trying them out.  Or Freshservice, how about you let me send approval emails to who ever I want.  Thanks.

Hi, we’re trying to automate our onboarding process using the Onboarding module.  We need to send approval requests to team members other than the Dept Head and Reporting Manager.  I’m trying to create a workflow automation that will send out the approval emails but have run into this problem

Has anyone found a work around to this problem?  I’ve tried creating custom objects and reading them in the workflow automation but I’m not able to get the objects into the “To” field when setting up the approval email.  Any guidance is greatly appreciated.

Hello @kenrisdon 

What we do is to use Custom objects as a list for approvers. 

But you need Pro or higher for this to work. 
 

@daniel.soderlund Thank You!  Your screen shots were just enough to get me on the right track.  I realized that I had my Custom Object configured incorrectly.  I now have approval emails going to the  correct individuals.

I really appreciate you taking the time to help out.

@daniel.soderlund I was looking at your solution for approval emails. I am trying to do something similar, however, I used a web request and parser node to get the desired email address for the approver. However, I am not able to reference the parser field in the approval email node. In your example, how were you able to reference the R6 object?

We have Enterprise.

Regards!

Kirk

I think you need to use the user ID and the field need to be set to number in the parser but don't quote me on that. 

The field in the custom object is a lookup field so the placeholder has the properties of  “user field”. 

@Daniel Söderlund  @kenrisdon  Hello, I am having the same issue described on this topic but I still don’t get with the solution. I am sure I am setting in the wrong way my custom object or the workflow.

Can someone share screenshots of the full configuration please?

My custom object

My workflow doesn’t find anything

I found the solution on this article: https://support.freshservice.com/en/support/solutions/articles/50000004020-reader-node

Awesome

Request for your feedback