Working with Report Approvals

Report Approval comes into picture when a report is publicly published.  A report can be published in any of the following ways:

Published as delivery option (Report Delivery Options page)

Published after viewing the report (For example from HTML Viewer, published as post-view operation)

Published through scheduling (batch scheduler or quick scheduler)

When a report associated with approval process is published, it gets listed on your Approval Pending Reports page if you are:

Owner (the one who published the report)

Approver

Commenter of the report.

What you can do to a pending report

What happens to a report

A commented report

The report will continue to appear in Approval Pending Reports.  A commenter (or approver) can comment it.

An Approved Report

The report will be removed from Approval Pending Reports.  It will be published and will appear on Published Reports.  All users who have rights to view it will be able to view and view comments for the report.

Important: Status of the approved report cannot be changed to Rejected.

A rejected report

The report will be removed from Approval Pending Reports.  It will appear in Published Reports but only to the Owner and the Super Administrator.

Important: Status of the rejected report cannot be changed to Approved.

Delay in delivery

A report is published in a selected output type.  If report delivery option for a report is email or FTP the report operation will not be started until the report is approved.

Figure 8: Pending Operations (causing delay in delivery)

Pending Operations column on Approval Pending Reports page will list all the pending operations for the report.

Approval Process: Working with comments

You can work on report approval in multiple ways:

Publish action from Report Delivery Options page

When a report is published from Report Delivery Options page, it will be listed in Approval Pending Reports page after it is generated.  You can View this report in HTML to open it in HTML Viewer, and comment it.

View action from Report Delivery Options page

When you generate a report for VIEW (in HTML) from Report Delivery Options page, it will open in HTML viewer. The report needs to be published before you can work with approvals.

On HTML Viewer, when you click Add Comment button, a dialog box to publish the report will appear for you to publish the report.  You can specify approval comments and also publish the report there itself.

Scheduled to be published

When a report is published as scheduled generation, once it is generated, it will be listed in Approval Pending Reports page.  You can View this report in HTML to open it in HTML Viewer, and comment it.

Publishing and commenting as post view operation

If you are report owner, then you can view the report, publish it as well as comment right from HTML Viewer.  General steps on HTML Viewer are:

1. Click Add Approval Process Comment

2. On Publish dialog, specify publish related information

3. Click Set Approval Status

4. On Add Approval Process Comment dialog, specify approval comments and click respective button

5. Back on Publish dialog, click Publish

Figure 9: Publish and work with approval as post-view operation

Add Approval Process Comment Dialog

Add Approval Process Comment dialog appears when you click the respective button on HTML Viewer.  It has area to specify comment text and approval related buttons.

Figure 10: Add Approval Process Comment dialog box

Button caption and window title will depend on the text specified on Approval Process page.
Select Show in next stage if you want users to view the comment when the report is approved / rejected.

Approving a report

To approve a report,

1. From the Approval Pending Reports list, open the report in HTML

2. Click Add Approval Process Comment

3. On Add Approval Process Comment dialog, specify comment text (optional) and click Approved

Rejecting a report

To reject a report,

1. From the Approval Pending Reports list, open the report in HTML

2. Click Add Approval Process Comment

3. On Add Approval Process Comment dialog, specify comment text (optional) and click Rejected

Commenting a report

You can add comments on a pending report or a published report.

To comment a report,

1. From the Approval Pending Reports list, open the report in HTML

2. Click Add Approval Process Comment

3. On Add c Comment dialog, specify comment text (optional) and click Add Approval Process Comment

Accessibility options for comments

While commenting, you have options to choose the users who should be able to view the comments.

Figure 11: Selecting users who can view comments

On Add Approval Process Comment dialog, click down arrow next to Visible to. Select the users who should be able to view the comments.

Viewing comments on a report

Report owner (the person who executed the report), approver / commenter and super administrator can view comments on a report that is approved, rejected as well as is pending.

A report is considered published only after it is approved.  All others who have access privilege to view that report will be able to view comments after the report is approved.  Published reports are listed on (Reports > Published Reports)

To view comments on a pending report, click  button in the row of that report.

Figure 12: Icon to be clicked to view comments for the pending reportTo view comments on a published report, click  button to Show Approval Process Comments on a List Toolbar Menu Style (or click this option under ellipsis on a Toolbar Menu Style).

Figure 13: Icon to be clicked to view comments for the published report

Printing comments along with the report

To print a published report, you need to open it in HTML Viewer.

On HTML Viewer, when you click Print With Comments button to print the report with comments along with the report.

Deleting Comments

For security reasons, application does not allow deleting comments made on its reports.