Select a single user for approval, from a drop down list of people with already an access to the file

[maximelehericy]

How to use GitHub

• Please use the 👍 reaction to show that you are interested into the same feature.
• Please don't comment if you have no relevant information to add. It's just extra noise for everyone subscribed to this issue.
• Subscribe to receive notifications on status change and new comments.

---

Feature request

Which Nextcloud Version are you currently using: (see administration page)
30

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

In rather large organizations, business processes can be standardized, but people with approval privilege can differ from a department to another.

One example, about how it would work for a non-digitized purchasing approval process:

• Alice, from the Production department wants to buy a new office chair
• she requests a quote from the supplying company, and fills out the purchase form
• she leaves for approval the documents on her boss's desk
• Alice's boss approves the documents (signs), and leaves the documents for the ordering to Bob, head of procurement.
• Bob, head of procurement agrees and signs the documents, and and them out to Charlie, who is in charge of issuing the order for Alice's new office chair.

In that case, the approval process is as follow:
Alice -> Alice's boss -> Bob -> Charlie

While the approval part from Alice's boss to Charlie will probably not change (approval of head of procurement), the first part of the approval process would change if done in a different departement. For instance, Eve, from the quality department, needs a new desk. The procurement process would be as follow:

Eve -> Eve's boss -> Bob -> Charlie

In the current implementation of Approvals, to implement the above, there are two ways:

1. you implement one approval workflow for the procurement for the Production department, and another one for the Quality department (and actually, as many approval workflows as there are departments).
2. you implement one approval workflow for all the departments, with:

• requester group: everyone allowed to initiate a procurement process
• validator group: all department bosses

The first approach is hardly scalable in an organization with dozens of services. That would create many many approval workflows.
The second approach will overload every department boss with approval notifications they have nothing to do with.

Describe the solution you'd like
It would be interesting to allow people triggering an approval process to select themselves the person they would like an approval from.

There could be a drop down list, similar to the sharing field, where the approval initiator could select a user from a drop down list.

The drop down list could be limited to:

• only people with already an access to the document
• people from a validation group
• ...

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context

[julien-nc]

This app was designed to work this way:

• Admins can define approval rules
• A rule defines who can request an approval and who can approve/reject (list of users and groups)

So it seems difficult to change that so that someone who is allowed to request an approval can choose who can approve/reject.

Maybe there is still something that could improve things here:
When requesting an approval, the user could choose a rule (as usual) and also optionally set a specific target user.

• Only this target user would be notified
• This would only work if the target user is authorized by the selected rule (if this user is explicitly authorized or part of a group that is authorized)
• All the authorized users/groups (in the rule definition) would still be able to approve/reject the file/folder (but they would not be notified when the request is made)

What do you think?

[maximelehericy]

@julien-nc thanks for the feedback. That will not fit the need. Closing as not planned.