v13.1.0 - Offline Approval URL not appearing in sent emails

[Ratismal]

Hi,

I'm currently evaluating with a Workflow license in order to test Offline Approvals. I'm having an issue where the emails sent do not contain the desired Offline Approval URL.

Reproduction

1. Create an offline approval group
2. Assign group to the workflow state of an item
3. Submit the item to workflow
4. The received email does not included an Offline Approval URL

Bug summary

When receiving an email sent to an Approval Group with "Enable offline approval" checked, the Offline Approval URL is not sent with the Approval Request email. This makes it impossible to actually utilise the Offline Approval system.

Note that I'm using v13.1.0 as for some reason v13.4.0 will not send any email notifications whatsoever, and thus I cannot test it. I didn't see any mention of offline approval in the changelog, so I apologize if this is a known issue that has already been resolved.

Group is configured as follows:

Approval Request template is the default as provided by Umbraco

When receiving the email, no Offline Approval URL is present.

Specifics

• Umbraco v13.4.1
• Workflow v13.1.0

Steps to reproduce

1. Create an offline approval group
2. Assign group to the workflow state of an item
3. Submit the item to workflow
4. The received email does not included an Offline Approval URL

Expected result

• Email is sent with an Offline Approvel URL

Actual result

• Email is sent without an Offline Approvel URL
  

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This item has been added to our backlog AB#50558

[nathanwoulfe]

Hey @Ratismal, this was raised internally too, and I wasn't able to reproduce it.

However, looking at your reproduction steps, I think this is related to setting the group email. Offline approval requires an Umbraco user exists with permission to approve the task, as it must be associated with a user. When using the group email, there's no Umbraco user, so no way to generate the offline approval URL. I suspect if you removed the group email it would work, with an email sent to each member of the approval group.

However again, your use case makes more sense - stakeholders who are not CMS users should still be able to participate in workflow approvals.

Offline approval doesn't exist in 14+ yet (the approach taken in 13 won't work for 14+), but I think it's time for revisiting how the entire feature works, to enable your use case and to get it working for latest CMS versions.

So long story short, I think what you're seeing is expected behaviour (eg it won't work with a group email), but it should, and will require refactoring the feature.

[Ratismal]

You got it perfectly, removing the group email works! Interestingly I had two users on this approval group, one that has permission to approve the task and one that doesn't. They both got emailed the same link, so the link switches between working and erroring out every time it's visited. Not a huge issue though as long as the accounts are properly configured during actual use.

I'm excited to hear that offline approvals haven't been completely dropped for 14+! If you're revisiting how the feature works, I might as well explain my use case here in greater detail, since it doesn't exactly align with the current offline approval system. Basically, we want to be able to share preview links to unpublished content within a workflow to various external stakeholders, for purposes of feedback. These stakeholders can't have access to the backoffice, and also likely shouldn't be able to approve content directly. Currently they're using emails and screenshots for this, and want something more tangible.

Offline approvals basically cover the majority of this use case. The requirement of links being associated with accounts that have approval permissions is a bit of a blocker, but is something that could potentially be worked around with additional workflow stages in the process to prevent accidental publishing. It would be nice to have some kind of read-only functionality out of the box though!

Regardless, than you for your help!