IT Shop Custom Approval Procedure Automatic Approval

Question

Hello, 
 I have an IT Shop approval workflow that utilizes both OOB and custom approval procedures. My question is, for the steps using custom approval procedures, why doesn't the automatic approval happen? For example, for one step I am using the OOB "CM - Recipient's Manager" approval procedure which, after approved, goes onto the next step which uses a custom approval procedure. The approver queried by the custom approval procedure is the same person as the recipient's manager so this step should be automatically approved, however, this is not happening. For the approval step using the custom approval procedure, I do NOT have the "No Automatic Approval" checkbox checked and for the IT Shop configuration parameters, all are set to enable automatic approvals. I've tested this with the OOB approval procedures and it works so I know it's not an issue with the configurations. Is automatic approval just not allowed for custom approval procedures? Below is my custom approval procedure query. 
 select pio.UID_Person as UID_Person, null as UID_PWORulerOrigin from PersonInOrg pio join AccProductGroup ag on ag.CCC_ApprovalGroup1 = pio.UID_Org join AccProduct a on a.UID_AccProductGroup = ag.UID_AccProductGroup join UNSGroupB u on u.UID_AccProduct = a.UID_AccProduct join PersonWantsOrg pwo on pwo.ObjectKeyOrdered = u.XObjectKey where UID_PersonWantsOrg = @UID_PersonWantsOrg

kenny ballaao · Answer

No problem Markus. I have contacted support and they are working on it. 
 In the meantime though, I was able to resolve the issue, but am not quite sure why it worked. I'll try to explain. 
 In our workflow we have 6 approver steps, the first one being the user's manager, and then the next steps being custom approvers 1-5. In the scenario where we are encountering the error, we have the user's manager and custom approver #1 being the same person. In another test, however, when we had the user's manager defined as custom approver #2, the automatic approval worked. Now I thought why would that be? I compared the approval procedure queries, the steps and their configurations for approver steps 1 and 2, and they were exactly the same except for the approver. Now, when I was examining the steps, I moved them out of place, and when I did the automatic alignment I saw something strange. Below is how the workflow looked before the auto alignment. 
 
 You can see that the CM step is before the U1 custom approval step. Now look what happens when I auto align it. 
 
 You see that? It moved the U1 step above the CM step even though that's not how they are connected! 
 I then thought why is that? When I analyzed the rest of the steps after the auto-alignment, it looks like it placed the steps in order of date created. Reason I thought this is because when I look at the most recent steps, they were at the very bottom even if they were connected higher up in the workflow. 
 From this I came to the conclusion that maybe the automatic approval isn't happening for the U1 step b/c the CM step doesn't recognize it as coming after it even though they are connected that way. Also, that's the reason automatic approval works for the U2 (Approver #2 step) because after the auto-alignment, that step comes AFTER the CM step. 
 To test this theory, I deleted the U1 step, re-created it, and re-attached it to the workflow as before. Doing this would make this step the most recently created step, therefore, placing this step at the bottom after the re-alignment, making it come after the CM step. Now, when I retested the auto approval with this change it worked! The CM step now recognizes the U1 step as coming after it since it was created at a later time. 
 Is there a reason why auto-align is using date created as the basis of auto-alignment? Also, why would date created affect auto approvals even if the steps are connected in the correct manner? Anyways, this is my guess as to why the auto approvals were not working. If anyone has any insight to this or if I'm totally wrong please let me know. I will inform support of my findings. 
 FYI, customer is on version 8.1.3 so this may have been a bug that is fixed in the later versions.