Understanding Request Consolidation

From the request activity page, you can select multiple requests that are still in flight and consolidate them into a single combined request.

Consolidating requests enables you to periodically aggregate all of the changes across multiple requests into a single request in order to review and approve them in bulk.

Tip:

• A consolidated request is a source request that was combined into a consolidation request.
• A consolidation request is a combined request made up of multiple consolidated source requests.

Consolidation Process Flow

The request consolidation process follows this general flow:

1. A user selects the requests to be consolidated on the Request Activity page. Requests can be selected for consolidation if they are in the same view, they have a status of In Flight, and they are not already a Consolidation type. The user must have at least Data Manager permission on all of the request items in all of the requests.
2. After the user clicks Consolidate Requests, the request items in the source requests are combined into a new consolidation request. Note the following about the consolidation process:
   • Requests are processed according to submit date. If two or more operations conflict with one another (that is, there are multiple changes to the same node across different original requests), the consolidation request will contain only the most recent change by submit date of the requests. For example, if a user submits a request to update a node description to "South", and then at a later time another user submits a request to update the description to "Southeast" to that same node, the "Southeast" update is contained in the consolidation request.
   • Request comments and attachments in the original requests are not carried forward into the consolidation request. You can navigate to the original consolidated requests to view the comments and attachments by inspecting the consolidation request.
   • The request file attachment contains a record of all request actions in all of the consolidated requests, including the users who performed them. Conflicting operations are highlighted with a note that a record with the same key was already processed. The attachment contains tabs for each viewpoint in the requests, and each tab contains links to navigate to the original source requests.
   • When consolidating requests, you can add the owners of the original requests as collaborators on the consolidation request. This enables the original request owners to contribute to the consolidation request, track its progress, and reference its details.
3. The source requests are updated with a status of Consolidated, and you cannot make any changes or perform any workflow actions (such as Approve) on them. However, you can continue to add comments and attachments and you can inspect the consolidated request to view workflow actions that were taken up to the time that it was consolidated. The request inspector also contains a link to the consolidation request on the Summary tab.
4. The consolidation request status is set to Draft and the stage is set to Submit. In the request inspector, the Consolidation tab displays the source requests that were combined to create the consolidation request.
5. If you discard the consolidation request, the original source requests are restored and placed back in the workflow where they were when they were consolidated. See Discarding a Consolidation Request