Question

This is a common problem that I find when programming a Lotus Notes App.

Use case: An employer fills out a request form in a Request database. A notification gets mailed to the person that may give them OK or REJECT for that request. The authority person visits the Request database and gives OK or REJECT.

Good. But, where would you save the approval status OK or REJECT:

• Should the authority person have write access to the original request
  and set the status directly (and may alter other data in the form)
• Should the aproval action create a response doc to the original (and i cannot show in a view the current status)

Answer 1

Typically you are better off setting an approval status directly on the request. That may not seem initially ideal, but remember Lotus Notes isn’t like a relational database where things would be more normalized.

Let’s consider the alternative, putting a status in the response document. Now how do you show all the requests with their statuses? You’d probably have to write some code just to do that when with the first option you could just create a view.

You can control the access to the document using reader and writer access fields. See how the built in template does it (the approval workflow template). Essentially as the document changes state (i.e. New, Submitted for Approval, Approved or Denied, etc), you can also change the reader and writer access fields at that point.