So I am trying to develop this seemingly simple reminder process and end up going in circles.  The whole process hinges on email approval by the way.  The users will be acting through email and not Laserfiche Forms.

1. When the task goes out, the requester indicates if Comments are required.

2. Approver get the task with a 4 hour timer.  An email containing the comments/instructions.

3. Approver emails back Approve or Reject.

4. Workflow runs to check comments (since you cannot check Forms for comments in gateways for some reason)?

5. Workflow passes back a variable to the form and we check comments again.  If comments are there and they were required, be done.

6.  If comments were not there are required, give them the task back (and yet another email containing the document since you cannot attach Laserfiche documents in Forms).

That seems like it is fine, even with the double emails and various oddities.

Now come the timers.

1. If the user does not respond in 4 hours, send them the task again (loop back to itself).

2.  On the timer event I have tried interrupt and not to interrupt.  Both result in an email.  I would think not interrupting the activity would not resend the task email?  It seems I can respond to either the initial email, or the email sent again when the timer is hit since it is the same task.  Why would it send the email again even if I pick to not interrupt the current activity.  Edit...It seems that if I respond to initial email and not the most recent it triggers approve and the end but I keep getting emails and the process is still "In Progress".

Finally, now the timers should not engage if it is outside business hours...

1. Have yet another workflow that runs to check the hours/day of the week and pass back a variable to the form.  The user should either get the second notice email or not depending on if its in business hours.

Here is now really where there seems to be a problem.  

1.  If outside of business hours, I can send the user to a copy of the original task but with no email.

2.  However, with no email, since the task has moved on, the whole thing stops as the approver cannot reply to any email.  Nor can they respond to the original email since its a new task.

3.  If I send them back to the initial task outside of business hours, they get an email...which isnt good because in theory they could be getting this throughout the weekend every 4 hours.

I am starting to think that there is not a way to do email based approval with timer events, checking for comments, and business hour logic.  Has anyone built something similar?

-Chris

Edit - Additional things tried.

1. When the task goes out, stick a 1 hour timer on it.  On the expiration, have a workflow then calculate all the business hour stuff and wait.  So if we submit at 3PM on Monday, workflow will hold until 10AM on Tuesday (4 working hours).

Problem/limitation

- Interupting the task - Users cannot approve the invoice during that holding window.  If workflow has it the task is gone from the user, only allowing them to submit it during that time frame.

- Not interupting the task - Workflow has it but also the user has it.  After the workflow finishes that task is assigned again.  Approving this task completes the process but leaves the initial task out there.

Need a way to terminate/complete a business process from Workflow.