Search Results keep_previous_approver




Overview
Explore in AI Chat

Overview

HXC_APPROVAL_WF_UTIL is a utility package in the Oracle E-Business Suite Applications (APPS) schema that supports the Oracle Time and Labor (OTL) approval workflow infrastructure. Its primary responsibility is to manage the persistence and reuse of approver identities across approval periods within the Oracle Workflow engine. When timecards or time entries are submitted and routed for managerial or supervisory approval, the Workflow engine must determine which approver is responsible for a given employee in a given application period. Rather than forcing end users or administrators to reconstruct approval hierarchies each period, this package allows the system to recall the approver associated with a prior period and optionally carry that approver forward to a new period.

The package is classified in ETRM as a UTIL (utility) API, indicating that it is intended for internal use by the OTL approval framework and other dependent packages rather than as a formally published public API. The header comment identifies the source file as hxcapprwfut.pkh, tracing back to a 2005 revision, which reflects the package's long-standing stability across EBS 12.1.1 and 12.2.2. The presence of keep_previous_approver as a documented function directly corresponds to the user's search term and represents the central behavior of the package.

Key Procedures and Functions

  • COPY_PREVIOUS_APPROVERS — A procedure that copies approver assignments from one workflow item to another. It is used to propagate the previously determined approvers from a source workflow process instance (identified by a current key) to a target process instance (identified by a copy-to key). This supports bulk or period-to-period replication of approval routing without re-deriving the approver from organizational hierarchy.
  • GET_PREVIOUS_APPROVER — A function returning a numeric value that resolves the approver associated with a specified workflow item and application period. It retrieves the previously recorded approver for the given item type, item key, and application period ID, effectively answering "who approved this last time?"
  • KEEP_PREVIOUS_APPROVER — A function returning a numeric value that determines whether the previous approver should be retained for the current approval cycle. This is the function invoked in response to the "keep_previous_approver" search. It evaluates the workflow item and application period context and returns a numeric indicator (typically a person or assignment identifier, or a flag value) used by the approval workflow to decide whether to reuse the prior approver rather than recomputing the approval path.

Tables Accessed

  • HXC_APP_PERIOD_SUMMARY — The Time and Labor application period summary table. It supplies the application_period_id context that scopes which period's approval data is being queried or carried forward.
  • WF_ITEM_ATTRIBUTE_VALUES — The Oracle Workflow item attribute values table. It stores and retrieves the workflow item instance data (item key and associated attributes) needed to identify the approval process instance and its stored approver attribute.
  • WF_ITEM_TYPES — The Workflow item type definition table. It provides item type metadata used to qualify which approval workflow (for example, the OTL timecard approval item type) the operation applies to.

Usage Notes

HXC_APPROVAL_WF_UTIL is not exposed through a standard concurrent program or a dedicated form. It is invoked indirectly by the Oracle Time and Labor approval workflow and by the three other packages that ETRM documents as referencing it. During the OTL approval process, the Workflow engine calls GET_PREVIOUS_APPROVER and KEEP_PREVIOUS_APPROVER to evaluate whether an approver from a prior application period should be reused, and calls COPY_PREVIOUS_APPROVERS when approval assignments must be cloned between workflow instances.

Because the package is classified as a UTIL API and resides in APPS, customizations that call it directly should treat it as an unstable internal interface. Developers extending OTL approval logic can reference the functions to replicate "keep previous approver" behavior, but should not modify the package. In both EBS 12.1.1 and 12.2.2 the same metadata applies, and there are no documented differences in the signature or behavior of these three program units between the two releases.