Debugging the Approval Workflow for Purchase Order or Purchase Requisition

Debugging the Approval Workflow for Purchase Order or Purchase Requisition

Step 1

Review the action history of the document having a problem. This is done in the Purchasing Summary screens – either Requisitions –> Requisitions Summary or Purchase Orders –> Purchase Order Summary. If you attempt to view the action history and you receive the following error:


APP-14288 This document is either incomplete or you do not have access to it


Then this represents that Workflow has not yet performed a submit into the action history table. The document approval manager performs the action of submitting a record into the Action History and therefore is required to be running. It should be confirmed that the document approval manager is running.


Step 2

Notification Summary – review the Notification Summary for the user that submitted the document. Are there any notifications present? Because online form messaging alerts are now present in the form of notifications, it is imperative that the summary be reviewed for any informative notifications explaining in more detail as to the problem.


Step 3

Confirmation that the Workflow Background Process has been run via the System Administrator responsibility.

This is done via Requests –> Run within the System Administrator Responsibility. The parameters should be the Item Type – PO or Requisition Approval and then

Processed Deferred = Yes, Process Time Out = Yes. Process Stuck = Yes if the Process Stuck parameter is available.


Step 4

Ensure that all tables contain the necessary space to record the Workflow processing data. As users submit a document for Approval and the Workflow process is called, data is recorded into a series of Workflow tables. To quickly confirm whether the tables are having space limitations or not? Run the following in SQL:


select value

from v$parameter

where name like ‘background_dump_dest’;


The value returned by this SQL statement represents the location of the alert log on the database server,

For the instance in question. Please ask the Database Administrator to review the latest entries into the alert.log to confirm if any errors are being thrown with regards to table space.


The most common scenario that has been linked to table space, is when a user hits the ‘Approve’ button in the approval screen, only to have nothing happen. There is no message returned stating document has been submitted for Approval, nothing happens. The hourglass comes for 1 second, and then leaves, and the approval form is still present. This is most likely a table space issue.


Step 5

Workflow Monitor from the Purchase Summary screens. Utilize the Workflow monitor to track the path which the document has taken during its submission to Workflow. Some important milestones to look for in the Workflow monitor are ‘Can Owner Approve’ and ‘Does Approver have Approval Authority’. Are there any processes that contain errors? Or does it appear that a process has stopped at a point that is incorrect?

Example is if a process stopped at a point that is not referencing a notification or some other request point for user interaction.

(Reference from Brother Ahmed Bilal Blog)