2438007 - Application error when approving workflow

When you approves a workflow you get an application error.

SAP-SuccessFactors-Employee Central

1. Go to my pending requests or the to-do tile;
2. Try to approve the workflow
3. See the application error.

There can be many different causes for an application error when approving workflows but there is one reccuring root cause that may be checked from the customer side before raise an case to product support which is permission.

If the approver does not have permission to perform the changes the workflow will perform, then an application error will be displayed.

Thus there are a few troubleshooting steps to check when you have an application error by approving a workflow to eliminate the most common case of problem.

QUICK TEST

A way to perform a very quick test when you have application errors in a workflow and you want to exclude permissions as root cause, is to assign a role with full permissions for the employee where you see the error, if the application error does not appear anymore, that means this issue is being caused by lack of permission, otherwise you can create in case to our support to further analisys from support.

By confirming the permission issue, can can check the troubleshooting steps below.

TROUBLESHOOTING STEPS:

1. First check if the approver has access to the employee where this changes take effect, for example, if you are changing Job Info for John Doe, then the approver must have access to the employee John Doe;
2. Check if the approver has access to the type of data that is being changed, for example, if you are changing Job Info for the employee John Doe, then the approver must have access to change Job Info for this employee;
3. Check if the approver has permission to change all the fields being maintained in the workflow, for example, if the workflow is changing the fields A,B and C in Job Info for the employee John Doe, then the approver must have permission to edit those field for this employee;

TIPs:

1. If your workflow maintains several fields, one effective way to check wether you have fields permission missing is to compare the portlet that this workflow maintais information for the approver and one admin, this way you can se which fields are displayed in the full permission and in the approvers role.
2. If all the fields seems to be available, you can try to edit the information for example job info and see which field can really be edited and which one not, if you have one field that is being maintained in the workflow but you cannot edit, this will cause your error. 

KBA , LOD-SF-EC-WFL , Workflows - Configuration, Tools, Objects & Rules , How To