Understanding Ownership Approvals

The Ownership approval method allows you to invite approvers based on an ownership property that you define for nodes in a viewpoint.

The ownership property on a node identifies the user who is responsible for approving requests for that node. After you assign an ownership property on the policy, the users that you identify are invited to approve any changes in request items that include that node. Each invited node owner must approve the request in order to fulfill the policy.

Note:

The term "owner" in the context of Ownership approval methods is not the same as the Owner permission on a data chain object. Node owners get invited as approvers on an approval policy, which grants only the ability to approve requests for that node. Node owners are not automatically granted any additional permissions for that node, such as the ability to view or edit that node.

Considerations

• You can configure the Ownership method on Approval policies only. You cannot configure the Ownership method on Commit or Notification policies.
• You can define multiple ownership properties on a node, which enables you to have more than one node owner as approvers for that node. Each property must be on a separate approval policy, since you can assign only one ownership property per policy.
• When nodes are moved from one parent to another, you can optionally specify which node owner is invited to approve the request action. On the Definition tab, use Require Move Approval(s) From to specify the previous owner, the current owner, or both. See Creating and Enabling Approval Policies.

  Note:

  If Include Management Hierarchy is enabled, then you can select from either the current or the previous owner, but not both. If you want both the previous and current owners (along with each owner's management hierarchy) to approve move requests, create separate approval policies for the previous owner and the current owner.
• The users that you designate as owners are chosen from a Users application (see Working with Users Applications) using Node data type properties with the User subtype (see Node and Node List Data Type Subtypes).
• Ownership approvals can optionally be extended to include the node owner's management hierarchy by enabling Include Management Hierarchy on the approval policy. See Creating and Enabling Approval Policies
• If the owner of a node is changed while a request is In Flight, the new owner is invited to approve and the previous owner is no longer invited to approve. If the previous owner has already approved the request, that approval is retained in the request history.
• If a node owner is not available (for example, the owner is not a valid user or is out of the office), the request is escalated. See Policy Reminders and Escalations.

Process Flow

The following describes the general process flow when setting up ownership approvals. It is not intended as a step-by-step procedure, but rather an overview of the steps that are required in order to utilize the ownership approval method.

1. Set up a Users application to store your users. (See Working with Users Applications.)

   Important: In order to be assigned as a node owner, a user in your Users application must be a valid user in Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Data Management (CoreStats.EDM User = True). The system uses the User.Email Address property in the Users application to determine valid users. See Predefined Properties for Users Applications.

2. Create a Node data type property with the User subtype to use as an ownership property. See Creating Properties Manually.
3. Associate the property with a node type in the viewpoint. See Adding a Property to a Node Type.

   Tip:

   For the Assigned Node Set and Allowed Node Types, select the appropriate node set and node types from the Users application that you created in step 1.
4. Configure an approval policy to use the Ownership method. (See Creating and Enabling Approval Policies).
   1. For Approval Method, select Ownership.
   2. For Ownership Property, select the property that you configured as an ownership property (created in step 2, above).
   3. Optional: For Require Move Approval(s) From, specify which node owner (current owner, previous owner, or both) is invited to approve the request action when a node is moved from one parent to another. See Creating and Enabling Approval Policies.
   4. Enable and save the policy.
5. Assign the node owners:
   1. In the viewpoint, create a request and set the value of the ownership property (created in step 2, above) for each node to a user in your Users application.

      Tip:

      Setting the value of this property to be inherited or derived can simplify this process.
   2. Submit and complete the request.

Request Processing

After you have configured your Users application, viewpoint, and approval policies for ownership approvals, invitees and policy fulfillment are calculated based on the value of the ownership property. When a request with an ownership policy reaches the Approve stage:

1. The Ownership policy is evaluated on the node for each request item that is associated with the policy.
2. For each node, the value of the ownership property is checked, and each user referenced by the ownership property is invited to approve the request. The users must be valid users in Cloud EDM.

   Note:

   If you have enabled the Require Move Approval(s) From setting on the approval policy to invite previous node owners to approve when the node is moved (see Creating and Enabling Approval Policies), when a node is moved the previous owner (that is, the owner of the parent that the node was moved from) is also invited to approve the request.
3. If Include Management Hierarchy is enabled on the approval policy (see Creating and Enabling Approval Policies), after the node owner approves the request, the request is sent for approvals from the management chain. See Request Processing with Include Management Hierarchy Enabled.
4. Each invitee must approve the request in order to fulfill the policy.
5. If an invitee is not a valid user or is out of the office, the request is escalated.

Request Processing with Include Management Hierarchy Enabled

If Include Management Hierarchy is enabled on the approval policy (see Creating and Enabling Approval Policies), the system evaluates the management hierarchy for each node owner in the request rather than for the request owner. Each node owner's management chain is processed independently after that node owner approves the request. If a request contains nodes with different owners, approvals can be active simultaneously in multiple management hierarchies. For information about how management hierarchy approvals are processed, see Request Processing in Understanding Management Hierarchy Approvals.

For example, suppose a request contains two nodes, Corporate and Retail, with the following owners and management hierarchies:

Node	Node Owner (Approver 1)	Manager (Approver 2)	Next-Level Manager (Approver 3)
Corporate	Emily	David	Sarah
Retail	Michael	Lisa	Robert

Each node in the above table is processed separately. For example, after Emily and Michael approve the request, approval requests are sent to David and Lisa. When David approves, the request is sent to Sarah. Similarly, when Lisa approves, the request is sent to Robert. Each management hierarchy is processed independently, and the request continues only after all required approvals have been completed.

Best Practices

• Node owners can always approve requests via the request inspector (see Request Inspector Actions). However, in order to be able to visualize the request changes in a viewpoint, node owners must have at least Participant (Read) access to the viewpoints that contains the nodes that they are owners on. See Security for Views and Viewpoints.
• Enable the Ownership Approval Permission predefined validation to display a validation error or warning when a request or viewpoint is validated if the node owner does not have at least Participant (Read) access to the viewpoint. See Predefined Validations.
• When you create the property that you will be using as the ownership property, set it as Required in the viewpoint so that node owners are always assigned to each node.
• Set up ownership properties as inherited (in a hierarchy viewpoint) or derived from a lookup (in a list viewpoint) so that when new nodes are added the ownership property is automatically populated.
• When you configure your ownership property, use the Selection Criteria Property, Select Criteria Operator, and Selection Criteria Value fields to ensure that only valid users are able to be assigned as node owners. See Node and Node List Data Type Parameters.

  For example:

  • Selection Criteria Property: EDM User
  • Select Criteria Operator: Equal
  • Selection Criteria Value: 1 (True)
• Create a separate list viewpoint specifically to maintain node ownership. This enables you to govern node ownership separately from any data changes.
• If you add a user in Access Control that you want to use as a node owner, you must also add them in your Users application before they can be used as an ownership approval user.