User Input Requests in Service Broker Inbox: More than Approvals

In this post, we will set the baseline on how to utilize user input requests for XaaS workflows in Service Broker where a user can input values for the User interaction right from Aria Automation without going into Orchestrator – a feature many customers ask for specifically when they want the approver to edit or modify values as per their needs – something you can’t do in the approvals (check this post by Brock Peterson) as it just provide you with options to approve or reject with a message. I want my users to know that something like this exists and how to set it up through this post. I will post some use-cases based on this in later posts.

User Input Requests: A feature that many customers ask for specifically when they want the approver to edit or modify values as per their needs.

In Action

So, how to set it up. I am using a very basic and simple workflow with a User Interaction item and a Scriptable task that prints the input prided by the user in Aria Automation Service Broker Inbox request.

• Create a workflow and add User interaction and Scriptable task.

• Setup the user input variables (which will be presented in Inbox) and the approvers groups or users as well as timeout-date.

• In that Scriptable task, you bind that variable and print it.

• Once done, release this workflow as a catalog item in Service Broker. If you want, have a look at official process to release workflow as a catalog item.
• Once the workflow is visible in the catalog item, request it and fill in the required details.

• Once the request is submitted and reached the step where it says Create – User Interaction Pending, go to the User Input Requests section in the Inbox.

• Look for the request and click Approve.

• Let the user interact with the form fields. Here, we are just simply asking to provide a string which will be used by the workflow to print it.

• Once the approver approves and fill the form correctly, the request will be marked as answered.

• In the backend XaaS workflow, we can see that workflow is able to process the user provide input and printed it in this case. You can obviously do calculations, corrections and change the course of workflow based on those inputs that are presented to the approver.

Troubleshooting

You might see this error “Manual User Interactions without assignees are not allowed in vRA. The workflow run has been cancelled.” if you haven’t set the LDAP configuration properly in the Options section in the workflow.