Sharepoint Workflow w/ Multiple Approvals

Question

I am trying to create a workflow in sharepoint that has multiple approvals.

So there is conditonal logic that says if Person A accepts the proposal continue on to Person B approval if person B approves move on to Person C etc etc.

I have my logic for how the workflow should run but I am running into problems with SharePoint Designer 2010. Apparently each approval process that you add to a workflow adds something like 1100 nodes of complexity. The sharepoint default setting is set to I think 5000 nodes. My workflow has 12 approval processes so it will not publish. I have run some powershell scripts that are supposed to increase the complexity of workflows sharepoint allows but its still not working.

Is there a way to do this without so many approval processes and I don't really want to do a custom process but if that's my only option I might have to.

Answer 1

I ran into the same problem while developing a workflow. The only solution I came up with is to wait for the approval status to equal 'approved' and then set a column in your list to give an indication that it is completed. i.e. a column named first_approval_complete.

when your first approval reaches the 'approved' status, set that column to equal 'YES'

Then have another workflow that is set to 'run on item change' that begins with an if statement that checks if first_approval_complete is equal to 'YES'.

A little bulky, and makes each workflow a tad slower, but you can have an infinite number of approvals if they are all serial.