Investment requests – And something more – Part 6/6 - #ARCHIVED#

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On 2018-09-18, I gave a presentation about the business solution “Investment requests” I created with: SharePoint Online (Modern team site), PnP PowerShell, Flow and PowerApps. The 45 minutes were over before I knew it. Several topics were not, or in lesser detail, presented. I therefor decided to start a blog post series specially for this.

The blog post series has the following topics:

  1. Introduction
  2. Executing Flow actions with service account permissions
  3. Email
  4. Permissions
  5. PowerApps
  6. And something more

Introduction

This blog post contains the following topics:

  • Color progress indicators
  • The authorization matrix
  • The status field in preparation document libraries
  • Fixed content type id for tasks
  • View formatting
  • Version history

Color progress indicators

It was required that color indicators were used to indicate the progress per role for an investment request. Five colors are possible:

  • Skipped – Grey
  • Assigned – Orange
  • Todo – Light orange
  • Approved – Green
  • Declined – Red

In the screenshot below, the color progress indicators are shown.

Column formatting is used to realize the color progress indicators. A role field (PM, BC, …) contains one of the 5 possible values (Skipped, …). Column formatting changes the field background color and the text color depending on the value. The width of the role fields is made as small as possible.

The authorization matrix

The authorization matrix contains the following fields:

  • Title – The name of the entity
  • Order – The order of financial ranges
  • Amount – The minimum amount of the financial range
  • Job Title – The role
  • Order amount – The order within a financial range
  • Employee – The employee in case of an overwrite
  • Overwrite – Overwrite the master data value?

The status field in preparation document libraries

Team members do not have access to the document library “Requests” or the task list. A status column is therefor introduced in the preparation document libraries. This field can only be changed by a Flow while the investment request process is in progress.

When PowerApps supports document libraries, the forms of the document libraries are changed with PowerApps so employees cannot change the status at all.

Fixed content type id for tasks

The content type containing the task is created with PnP PowerShell. This way, a fixed content type ID could be used. The plan is that all processes with a task list create a task content type with this ID. This way, a search web part can be created which shows all active tasks in all processes. Process tasks are aggregated this way. Employees only have to go to that site to see all their tasks in the processes. The investment request process is one of the processes.

View formatting

As can be seen from the image in section “Color progress indicators”, view formatting was used. The column “Status” is used to color rows. Declined investment requests are colored red. Approved investment requests are colored green. Requests in progress have no color.

Version history

Version history is enabled on the document library “Requests”. This way, the approval history could be inspected when needed. An example is shown below.