Debugging the Approval Workflow for Purchase

Order or Purchase Requisition

October 18, 2008
tags: APP-14288, background_dump_dest, Does Approver have Approval Authority, Process Time Out,
Processed Deferred, Purchase order Approval, Requisition Approval, This document is either incomplete
or you do not have a, Workflow Background Process
by Ahmad Bilal
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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
Notification summary.->
You go to Requisition Summaty.
Query with P.R. Number
On Req.Summary Header Screen, Select "TOOLS" from above menu and select "VIEW APPROVAL THRU WORKFLOW" .
It will open the Error Screen.
You note down Item Key / User Key
Switch over to "Workflow Administrator web (New)" responsibility.
Select "Adminstrator Workflow > Workflow status monitor"
Give Internal Name as "REQAPPRV" and give Item Key / User Key
After retrieving record, restart the workflow activity

you please verify document total bofore you have send approval from clerk user, becase
purchase requisition amount could not exceed document total. i think this is your problem.
Hi friend,
I think you are your user will not have the approval limitfor approving the purchase

requisition. You can check through the following Navigation.

Purchase Order>Purchase Order Summary>Inquiry>Action History.
Through that navigation you will find the next approval hierarchy.

I have recently run into this issue as well. If you checked all of your setups and everything
is correct (eg, approval authority is granted to the users in question, but you are still
receiving that error) you need your system administrator to retry the workflow. Sometimes
documents get "stuck" in workflow (for various reasons, too many to get into at this point)
but if you double-checked your setup and your document and it seems in order, your
system administrator needs to retry the previous process in the workflow environment.