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To view the properties of the Notify Approver subprocess, select its process activity in the navigator tree, then choose Properties from the Edit menu. The Notify Approver subprocess has a result type of Approval, indicating that when the subprocess completes, it has a result of Approve or Reject (based on the lookup codes in the Approval lookup type). It is not runnable, indicating that it cannot be initiated as a top level process to run, but rather can only be run when called by another higher level process as a subprocess.

When you display the Process window for the Notify Approver subprocess, you see that the subprocess consists of 6 unique activities, several of which are reused to comprise the 9 activity nodes that appear in the workflow diagram. To examine the activities of the process in more detail, we have numbered each node for easy referencing below. The numbers themselves are not part of the process diagram.

The subprocess begins at node 1 with the Start activity. At node 2, the comments from the previous approver, if any, which are stored in the Note item attribute, are assigned to the Note for Reminder item attribute for use in the Reminder-Approval Needed notification. Then the Note item attribute is cleared, so that it can be used to store comments from the current approver.

At node 4, the process notifies the current approver to approve a requisition within a specified period of time. If the approver approves the requisition, the subprocess ends at node 7 and returns the result Approve to the top level Requisition process. Similarly, if the approver rejects the requisition, the subprocess ends at node 9 and returns the result Reject to the top level Requisition process.

If the approver does not respond by the due date, the subprocess takes the <Timeout> transition to node 5 to send a reminder to the approver to approve the requisition. Node 5 also has a timeout value assigned to it, and if the approver does not respond to the reminder by that time, the subprocess takes the next <Timeout> transition to loop back to node 5 to send another reminder to the approver. This loop continues until the approver approves or rejects the requisition, which would end the subprocess at node 7 or 9, respectively.

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