Automation Rules: Example 5
Reminder of approval when it is delayed by the approving authority
The workflow cannot be continued if the matching person has not agreed on the corresponding matching task. If the coordinator forgets about the task, the workflow manager can send him a reminder. This example shows how to do this using an automation rule that will send a reminder after 1 day (if the task status is still ‘Assigned').
In this case, automation consists of two rules. The first rule sends a reminder to the concordant, it is triggered by the trigger ‘After delays’. The second rule determines which period is considered a delay. After a delay of 1 day, the first rule is triggered.
The main elements of such an automation rule are described below.
Confirmation Reminder
Trigger
The rule must be executed with a delay of 1 day, respectively, the option ‘When updating the status’ is selected in the "Trigger" field.
Expressions
The following expressions are set for the rule. In the future, they are used to determine the condition of the rule and the actions performed by it.:
1. is_assigned
The expression is_assigned defines that the value of the "Status" field of the approval task is still
‘Assigned' (if the status has changed to ‘Rejected’ or ‘Agreed’, then you do not
need to send a reminder). The expression is defined as follows:
status = assigned
Condition
After defining the expression, the rule is given a condition under which this rule is fulfilled. In this example, the task status should be ‘Assigned'. Since there is already an expression for this, the true condition looks like this:
is_assigned
That's all you need to enter in the "Condition" field for the rule.
Delayed execution
The action that should be performed by the rule is deferred, so it consists of two parts. First, the "After" field indicates the duration of the delay. Then, in the "Start" field, the rule is selected, which is executed after the delay.
After
The delay duration must be set. The time can be set in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, or years. In this example, the delay duration of 1 day is defined as follows:
1.day
This expression can also be defined as follows:
24.hours
or
1440.minutes
or
86400.seconds
If the date and/or time were obtained through an expression, they can be used to
perform calculations. For example, if the desired deadline for completion of the agreement was
defined in the expression completion_target, then using this expression you can
determine the moment that occurs 1 hour before the deadline for completing the task:
completion_target - 1.hour
This expression can be specified in the "After" field.
The beginning
Select the automation rule that has the value ‘After delay’ in the Trigger field. In the example under consideration, the rule "Reconciliation Reminder" is selected as follows:
Confirmation Reminder