Suppress Approval Controls in Oracle BPM – Hidden Workspace Feature

My good friend and Oracle ACE Director Antonis Antoniou blogged has about how approval controls can be disabled in the Oracle BPM Suite 12c workspace.

http://antonis-antoniou.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/suppress-approval-controls-from-bpm.html

This article is not an attempt to splog what Antonis has already shared. In his blog Antonis provides a mechanism to trick the BPM 12c human workflow engine into disabling the approval controls for a task, visible in the BPM workspace, by manually modifying the .task configuration file. While this is a great workaround, it would become cumbersome if this was to be done for all tasks. If this is a critical functionality, there will be an additional manual step to verify that the approval controls do not appear for every task that is accessed from the workspace. Also as this configuration is embedded in the .task file which is part of the composite assembly, any change in requirement to enable approval flow in the BPM workspace again, will require a redeployment of the composite.

Ironically, there is another feature available from the BPM workspace, albeit still HIDDEN, to disable the task approval controls at the workspace level.

Login to the BPM Workspace as an administrator and navigate to Administration –> Application Preferences. Among the many workspace preferences that can be set or changed from here, the one relevant to disabling approval control in the BPM workspace is the Worklist Action Menu option. Choosing between Show or Hide will either enable or disable the feature at runtime.

By default the value for this option is set to Show. The Action menu will show a list of pre defined workflow actions that are available for the selected task in the workspace.

When the Worklist Action Menu control is set to Hide and saved through the Application Preferences setting, the Action button will be disabled on the workspace.

This is a true runtime change meaning, administrators can flick the values to choose their desired behaviour. Once this change is applied, it also effects all tasks that are accessed from this workspace. 

This also available in Oracle BPM Suite 11g but only if you are using 11.1.1.7 (PS6) from the Application Preferences console for workspace administrators.