Workflow: Dynamic E-mail Recipient and Access Right Generation

asked on May 8, 2013 • Show version history

Good morning,

I am trying to create a Workflow that routes a folder, and then sends an e-mail notification. The folder it routes to is based on a person's name, which the initiator selects from a pulldown field. What I want to do is have it also send an e-mail notification to that person, but I would like it to dynamically pull that information.

The further complicating factor is that there are literally hundreds of thousands of users on this domain so there are frequently repeat usernames. For example, for John Smith we probably have a jsmith, jsmith2, jsmith3, jsmith4 etc.

The good news is that all of the people who would receive e-mail notifications are also registered in the Rio License Manager.

I was thinking that in our giant pulldown menu of names, we could have them listed as such:

Jane Johnson (jjohnson1)

John Smith (jsmith3)

And then in the Workflow I could Regular Expression the username out of the parentheses, and then dump that in to the "To:" line of the e-mail as the person to route it to. If you have a better suggestion for this, please let me know.

Furthermore, I need to dynamically create the Access Rights to their approval folder. So if this is the first time John Smith receives an invoice to approve, it will be relocating the "Invoice 123456" folder to:

Invoice Processing\Finance\John Smith\Invoice 123456

The John Smith folder would have been created at that point, and I need that particular folder to only be accessible to John Smith. I also need the parent folders, Invoice Process and Finance, to give him "Browse" rights only so he can dig down to his newly created folder. Can Workflow do all of this?

Thanks for your assistance! I think this is a fun one.

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APPROVED ANSWER

replied on May 9, 2013 • Show version history

Your idea for the drop-down list of users is pretty clever and should work well. The only issue is that you’ll need to manually add or remove users from the list every time someone joins or leaves the organization. It might be cool if you could find a way to programmatically dump the list of users to a SQL table in the appropriate format (“John Smith (jsmith3)”) on a daily basis. Then you could make your dropdown list a dynamic field, so that it’s automatically kept up to date. Or maybe you could use Workflow to keep your list current? Worst case scenario though, you have to curate the list manually, and you just make sure someone stays on top of it.

As for setting security, that’s definitely possible. You can use the ‘Assign Rights’ activity in Workflow to set the appropriate rights on a folder, and ‘Find Entry’ to locate all the folders that need to have access rights configured. So you can use ‘Route Entry to Folder’ to create a new folder for a user, and then ‘Assign Rights’ to set security on it. Then you can use ‘Find Entry’ to find the parent folder and set rights on that. Then another ‘Find Entry’ to find the parent folder of your parent folder, and set the rights there. Repeat as necessary.

I hope that answers your questions! If you need more specific help with things, just let us know where you’re struggling and we’ll be happy to help.

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Workflow: Dynamic E-mail Recipient and Access Right Generation

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