How to find out the manager of a user in a workflow

Please click here for full reference on Lookup Extension DSC.

Summary

There are a lot of situations where we need to find out the manager of a user in LiveCycle, for example if a task is assigned to a user and it has not been worked on for a certain amount of time, we would like to escalate the task to his/her manager or send an email to his/her manager. It is difficult for the process designer to know in advance when designing the process to find out who the manager of a user is.

To achieve this, Avoka have developed a component that does the lookup for the manager of a user.

Scenario

When designing a workflow or a process that involves a user step, you often want to involve the user's manager. For example, when escalating a task, we might want to escalate the task originally assigned to the user to their manager after a certain amount of time and having not been completed. Another case could be simply to send an email notification, once a task is assigned to a user.

The question is how can we find out the manager of a user. We have provided the Avoka Lookup Extension DSC with an operation to lookup the manager of a user. It returns a variety of the manager user details, such as full name, email address, etc. In this documentation we will also show you how to synchronize to an LDAP server, so that the manager information is pulled in upon LiveCycle ES domain synchronization.

The Lookup Extension Service

This contains an operation, called "Lookup Manager", that looks up for the manager of a user and returns the manager user details.

To obtain an evaluation copy of the Lookup Extension Service, go to the Avoka Website: http://www.avoka.com and follow the links.
The Lookup Extension DSC, once installed, will appear as a new service under the category Avoka in your LiveCycle WorkBench.

Setting Up LiveCycle Domain to Synchronize with an LDAP Server to Support Lookup Extension Service

For the Lookup Extension Service to work, it needs the LDAP directory settings to be configured in certain way.

1. You need to configure your LDAP server to specify a manager attribute for user.

2a. If you have not configured a user management domain to synchronize with the LDAP server, please create a new Enterprise Domain and create a new LDAP directory for that domain. At the third step in creating the LDAP directory, you will need to specify the mapping between the LDAP user attributes to be pulled in to LiveCycle ES User Management User information. The page will look like the following picture. Note: please make sure you put the manager attribute you created in the step earlier into "Postal Address" field.

2b. Or alternatively, if you already have an LDAP directory created for your LiveCycle ES Server, go to its Domain Management and edit the Directory, and go to Directory Users tab as shown in the picture below. Like the 2a. step, make sure you set the "Postal Address" value to the manager attribute you specified in Step 1.

3. Perform domain synchronization for the domain you were editing in step 2, to pull in all user information from LDAP into LiveCycle ES including the manager information for users.

The Process

In the above process, initially we are looking up for a user that matches with the criteria and to get the user principal ID, in order to assign a task to the user. Before we do that we also want to find out the user's manager, so that in case the user could not complete the task assigned to him/her in a certain amount of time, we want to escalate the task to the user's manager. Therefore we have a step in the middle to lookup for the user's manager and use its manager principal ID to set up the User operation task escalation properties.

For demonstration purpose, we have provided the exported sample processfor the process described above, as an attachment to this article. You can import it as a process to your LiveCycle ES via workbench for guidance in setting up property values for the Lookup Manager operation step and how you might want to use the manager user details.

Setting Properties for Lookup Manager Operation

To configure the properties of the Lookup Manager operation step, click on that step, and then click on "Properties" view on your Workbench. It will show a dialog box as shown above.
For this case in the sample process, we are only interested in the manager principal ID to specify the user for the task escalation. As you can see from the picture above, the manager user details consists of a variety of information of the user that you can use.

Setting Properties for User Operation to Setup Task Escalation

To configure the properties of the User operation step, click on that step, and then click on "Properties" view on your Workbench. It will show a dialog box as shown above.

Now to assign a user, in case the task is escalated, click on Escalation, check on the box "Escalate task" and set the period to wait before escalation should occur, and most importantly select the escalation user with the manager principal id we have obtained from lookup manager operation.