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Title
How to troubleshoot the Usage Area Error observed when attempting to save an approval workflow -
Description
After adding an approval step to a workflow, the following error is thrown when attempting to save the workflow:
"This approval policy is not valid: Error - The usage area of approval procedure 'XXX-XXXXX' at step 'CCC_Workflow' does not match."
What does this error mean and what are the steps to further investigate this error? -
Cause
Using "EX - Approvals to be made externally" added to CCC_ITShopWorkflowtest ITShop approval workflow as example:
The error message is as follows:
"This approval policy is not valid: Error - The usage area of approval procedure 'EX - Approvals to be made externally' at step 'CCC_ITShopWorkflowtest' does not match."
The above error message indicates a mismatch in the expected value of UsageArea value for the EX Decision Rule.
To provide more context, 'Usagearea' is a column on PWODecisionRule (Approval step) and can hold 2 values. Namely, 'A' for Attestations and 'I' for ITShop.
Using the query: select * from PWODecisionRule where uid_pwodecisionrule like '%-EX' there are actually two EX procedures, one for PWOs and one for AttestationCases.
Since this is an ITShop Workflow the expected value in Column UsageArea for the EX decision rule should be 'I' to match the workflow and the error message suggested in this value does not match and hence not 'I'. -
Resolution
Since the error occurs while saving the workflow, the PWODecisionRule is likely not updated to the database (DB) yet.
One method is to export the SQL insert command of the workflow with the workflow step (e.g. EX) added. See the screenshot below:
With the SQL Insert command pasted to the text file, search for the procedure name added, in this case "EX". A sample search produced the following results:
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insert into PWODecisionRule (UID_PWODecisionRule , DecisionRule, UsageArea, Description , MaxCountApprover, SortOrder, UID_Task , XDateInserted , XDateUpdated , XObjectKey , XUserInserted , XUserUpdated )
values (N'ATT-PWODecisionRule-EX', N'EX' , N'A' , N'Approvals to be made externally', 1 , 310 , N'ATT-K-AttestationMakeDecisionEX', '2016-12-19 04:18:48.240', '2016-12-19 04:18:48.240', N'PWODecisionRuleATT-PWODecisionRule-EX
', N'QBM_PBufferT_ProcessInsert', N'QBM_PBufferT_ProcessInsert')
---------------------------As highlighted in the insert command, the UsageArea value for this insert is 'A' instead of the expected 'I' value. The UID_PWODecisionRule value, 'ATT-PWODecisionRule-EX' also indicates the attestation EX procedure was selected instead of the expect EX procedure for ITShop ,'QER-PWODecisionRule-EX' . This means the Manager Edit Workflow tool is trying to insert an Attestation EX approval step into and IT shop work flow.
Next step is to find out why the user interface (UI) is performing this wrong selection. To do so we need to enable "Show Field definition" for Manager and check on the Condition for selecting the Approval procedures in the approval step edit window:
Out of the box, the condition value should be "((SortOrder >= 0) and (UsageArea = N'I'))" which will select PWODecisionRules with Sortorder > 0 and UsageArea value = 'I'. This is potentially due to some customization or modification which was changed.