Email Approval

Sometimes there is the desire for a simple decision to be made on a form that doesn’t warrant loading the whole form. An example might be an approval step… Sometimes the approver may just want to approve the work without viewing it, perhaps because the work came from a trusted source.

SmartIQ allows the definition of an “email approval” or “choice” in this kind of scenario. A designer can define that an email (or other HTML producing action) can contain this choice, either as a button or a link. When that button/link is clicked, SmartIQwill take the same action as if the person had logged into SmartIQ loaded the form in Produce, made the appropriate action (such as ticked “approve”) and submitted the form.

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Safe Links will prevent the proper use of this feature

Microsoft Outlook's anti-phishing "feature" effectively clicks on every link it finds in an email to check it's safe and SmartIQ has no way to know that the click that comes from Safe Links is not a user. Other email programs or security software may implement similar safe links features.

This will result in the following message: This task has not been found. It may have already been actioned when the email recipient attempts to click on any of the "choice" links in their email.

For this reason, if your users are likely to be using Outlook or have this sort of security enabled on their email, the use of "choice" links is not recommended.

Usage

A choice is defined by a special style of question reference that takes the following form:

[Choice.q1.1]

Where q1.1 is a reference to a multiple choice answer in the form.

This question reference will resolve itself to a button that will have text equal to the display text of the multiple choice answer.

This button can be included in an email or any other action. When clicked, a link behind the button will call SmartIQ and SmartIQ will, behind the scenes, load up the form in its current state, select the reference multiple choice answer and then attempt to “submit” the form.

Therefore, if Conditions that reference the multiple choice answer control workflow from that state, then the form will be moved to that next state without the person who received the email having to interact with SmartIQ at all.

Options

A few options can be used to customise the appearance of a Choice reference. These are applied by adding | separated values to the reference. For example, the following reference will display as a link instead of a button and will have the text “Approve Now” instead of the display text of q1.1:

[Choice.q1.1|type=link|text=Approve Now]

The following options are available:

Example using URLOnly Type
Following sample code can be added to the Label to format button

<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table border="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody>
<tr><!--Approve-->
<td style="background-color: #4ecdc4; border-color: #4c5764; border: 2px solid #45b7af; padding: 10px; text-align: center;"><a style="display: block; color: #ffffff; font-size: 12px; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase;" href="[Choice.q2.2|type=UrlOnly]&comment=Approved" target="_blank">Approve Request</a></td>
<td></td>
<!--Reject-->
<td style="background-color: #dd5a5a; border-color: #4c5764; border: 2px solid #a03d3d; padding: 10px; text-align: center;"><a style="display: block; color: #ffffff; font-size: 12px; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase;" href="[Choice.q2.3|type=UrlOnly]&comment=Rejected" target="_blank">Reject Request</a></td>
<td></td>
<!--Return-->
<td style="background-color: #e8b04a; border-color: #4c5764; border: 2px solid #a57d35; padding: 10px; text-align: center;"><a style="display: block; color: #ffffff; font-size: 12px; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase;" href="[Choice.q2.4|type=UrlOnly]&comment=Returned" target="_blank">Return to Travel Requester</a></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Adding Project Property values

The URLOnly type (or an external integration) can pass query parameters to the URL to set Project Properties in the target form. These can be added in the same format as the comment mentioned above:

[Choice.q2.2|type=UrlOnly]&Property1=value1

The above would set the value of "Property1" to "value1" when running the form, which can drive additional logic.

Ability to Customise Email Approval Features

Approval by emails are now accepting customisable message to be added to the the choice parameters. The Standard format is:

[Choice.{question reference}|type={button, link or urlonly}|message={inline message or question reference}]

Example:
[Choice.q1.1|type=urlonly|message=the request is approved]
[Choice.q1.1|type=link|message=[q2]]

Within the message parameter it is possible to use the special value {{message}} which will be replaced by the contents of the Email Approval Template defined in Communication Templates, if set. If the template is blank, the choice message will be displayed as it is.

Security Implications

Any unauthenticated person can call the URL contained in the email. This will trigger the execution of that choice regardless of who calls it. Therefore the use of this feature has to take into account the security implications.

SmartIQ minimises the security risk by ensuring that there is an id in the URL that cannot be guessed and is unique for each choice, for each form, for each person receiving it. For example, if the same multiple choice reference is used twice in the same action, there will be two different ids, even if both will do the same thing.

All URLs for a particular workflow state will cease to work once one of them has been actioned (or the form submitted via a different means – such as submitting via Produce).