Request Manager Approval for Multiple Employees in 1 email

zacpolin

Hello, I'm trying to create a workflow to accomplish an access approval. Any help would be appreciated. Below is my criteria.

1. Find a list of Admin users and there managers from a dataset. The dataset I have is already filtered down to include this information. There is less than 20 rows of data.
2. Send an email to their manager requesting them to approve their access.
   1. If there are multiple employees under the same manager, that manager should only get 1 email. Multiple tasks would be alright so they could accept/reject on an individual basis but we don't want a manager getting spammed with multiple emails.
3. Store the results of the response in a dataset.

So Far:

I'm using the query table function to get a list of the admin users and their managers. I'm currently saving the output as an object list

SELECT "Domo User Display Name" DomoUserDisplayName, "Domo Role" DomoRole, "Manager Email" ManagerEmail FROM dataset

I then created a general task to assign a task to the manager but I'm unsure how to assign each manager individually a task for there employee(s) only.

I have Domo IDs and email addresses for both employees and managers in the dataset depending on which is better for the workflow.

JasonAltenburg

It sounds like you need to iterate through the dataset twice to get what you want.

First pass: Group the results by manager to send a single notification email per manager. Unless personalization is crucial, you can simplify the email content since the manager will be directed into Domo to complete tasks anyway. If you do want to list employees in the email, loop through each manager’s employees and build a concatenated list to include in the message body.

Second pass: Create an individual approval task for each employee, assigning it to the appropriate manager. That way, managers receive just one email but see distinct tasks for each direct report requiring access approval.

zacpolin

Hi Jason,

Thank you. This was very helpful and led me to create a working model. I decided I don't need to send an email to the manager with the employees in the message body since they will just be directed into Domo anyways.

I created the below to iterate through the dataset but it sends 1 task/approval email to the manager per employee. Is there a way to create the individual approval task but only notify the manager once? Or is this what you were referring to with the grouping by manager?

DanHendriksen

In your step where you gather employee name and manager, don't you still have the association of employee ID to manager?

While it's possible to aggregate all the requests for one manager and roll them up in to one task, it's going to introduce quite a bit more complexity.

zacpolin

Hi @DanHendriksen, thanks for taking a look at this!

Yes, I still have the association of employee ID to manager in that step.

Understood. I agree that having individual tasks for each employee to manager association is the best approach. I was just hoping not to spam managers with multiple emails all at once since a manager could have multiple employees reporting to them.

i.e. when this process runs I would get 1 email asking me to review my tasks for my employee(s). If I had 10 employees I would get 1 email but still 10 tasks in Domo. The way it's currently built, I would get 10 emails within seconds of each other.