Display Approval Tasks on InfoPath Form

I’be been working through building InfoPath forms to streamline the approval process of some internal documents, and one of the project requirements is to display the date / time as well as comments of each person who approves a document.

I built a SharePoint Designer workflow which first computes the approval routing (which varies between 8 and 10 approvers depending on the value of some fields),  then collects the approvals via the “Start Approval Process” task, and then emails up to 10 SharePoint groups based on a different set of criteria on each document.

SharePoint Designer Workflows store these “Assigned Tasks” in a Task List, which the developer is able to specify.  Each Task in the Task List contains a HIDDEN COLUMN called WorkflowItemId which associates the Task with the Item against which the workflow is running.   This column is a pesky little bugger for reasons explained below.

There is a blog post which describes one method for displaying all approvals tasks on the actual InfoPath form which goes roughly as follows:

  1. Create a new custom list containing all of the columns you need to reference
  2. Edit the “Behavior of a Single Task” for the Approval Process in question so that if the outcome is approved, add a new item to the custom list
  3. Add a Data Connection on the InfoPath form to pull data from the new custom list and display it on the form.

I didn’t want to go through the hassle of creating a separate list for each workflow I’m running, just to store data that’s already being stored in the associated Task List.

So, the big question: Why don’t you just add the Task List as an InfoPath Datasource and call it a day?

Well, the answer to that question may infuriate you: you are unable to filter the list according to the ID of the item in question because the attribute that stores the item id (WorkflowItemId) is forcibly hidden! 

  • InfoPath does not provide WorkflowItemId as an option in the Data Connection query path.
  • CSOM CAML queries error out when you attempt to use WorkflowItemId as a query field, so the SOAP / REST Data Connections in InfoPath also fail.

Other than the solution above, there are really only two other options:

I went the second route, and created such a web service, which is available here: https://github.com/bciu22/ApprovalTaskListService.

The result is that you can add an InfoPath Data Connection that looks something like this:

So that you can have a repeating table on your form with all approvals that looks something like this:

 

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