Sharepoint Designer 2010 makes life easy for many developers and helps them develop complex workflows without writing a single line of code. But there are many settings presents on SPD2010 Designer which we have to learn.
Here I am going to mention the steps on how to assign a task and send task notification email to each members of the Sharepoint group by using SPD2010 Workflow. SPD2010 Workflow has given many actions to work on that and one of the intersting and mostly used action is “StartApprovalProcess“.By using this action, we can define any kind of approval process like Document approval process,leave application approval from manager.
Use of StartApprovalProcess Action
By using StartApprovalProcess Action, the user can assign a task to one or many persons or to a Sharepoint group for approval process and it will create tasks for each member in the approval list.
Current Issue with the StartApprovalProcess Action
If one user assign a task to a sharepoint group and needs approval from each member of this group then this action will fail to work as it will only assign one task to the each of the group instead of each memeber of the group.
How to assign the task to each member of the group
1. Open the respective Sharepoint site on SPD2010 2. Click on “Workflows” from the left navigation 3. Select any of the available workflow template ( for example select Reusable Workflow) 4. Give appropriate name and select the content type or choose the default value based on requirement 5. Then select “StartApprovalProcess” from the Ribbon menu 6. Just hover the mouse on the line which is “Start Appr……..” 7. You can find the context menu dropdown at the right corner of the selected line 8. Select that context menu and click on Properties 9. Then one popup will open with all the properties for this Action
10. You can find one of the properties named as “ExpandGroups” and it’s default value is “No”
11. Change the value from “No” to “Yes” and then click on OK
Now your’s StartApprovalProcess Action is ready to assign a task to each member of the Sharepoint group.