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A 'manual approval' allows your agents to select the appropriate approver as required from a drop-down field that appears in the apps pane on the right, and then initiate the approval at a time of their choosing.
For each manual template, you're able to define the precise ticket field conditions that will cause it to show.
Let's go ahead and create an example template, shall we...
Our template will require approval for tickets where the "travel request" form has been selected.
Step 1: To create an approval template first click the approvals app on the left, and then click on the "Approval Templates" tab and next on "Add approval template" at the bottom.
Step 2: Once you've got the template open, you'll need to give your approval a name and description like this:
Step 3: The next step is to define the message that gets sent to the approver.
The message is quite multifunctional in that you can use Zendesk placeholders to dynamically pull information from the field on the ticket in question.
In this case, we're requesting approval for the information held in 5 ticket fields (Destination, requestor, reason & dates(from & to).
You may be wondering, well great! ...but how is that multifunctional? The answer is that any placeholder used within the "message to Approver" field, will lock the fields once the approval has been sent. This means that no one can change the contents of those ticket fields at any point after the approval has been sent, making the data that has been approved on the ticket more watertight.
The only way that data within locked fields can be changed is if all approvals on the ticket referring to the ticket data are cancelled or restarted. ie. All approval templates referring to a specific field need to be in an 'unsent' state to be able to change the data within them.
Step 4: Tags...
The app allows you to define tags that will be automatically added to the ticket at various states of the approval's life cycle. For example, if you wanted to kick off another workflow once this approval was granted you could set a tag to be added like this.
...and then build a trigger that looks for tickets that have been updated with that tag. But you can leave it blank too - it doesn't matter for this example.
Step 5: Now it's time to turn this template into a manual approval, by checking "enable manual requests" at the top right (a).
Next up, (b) you'll need to select the form in which you want the approval to show on (ie. what types of tickets require this approval). However, if you don't have any forms, or if you want to set more complex conditions, then you'll need to click on "Switch to advanced condition editor" (c). We've written a separate article on how to use the advance condition editor here.
At the bottom (d) you can select any combination of approvers whom your agents will be able to select as the approver on these tickets.
Ok great! All you need to do is save the approval, then refresh your browser to make sure Zendesk loads in all the new information. Then when you'll need to create a test ticket you should see something like this:
Note: The approvals app on the right will not show until the ticket has actually been created. If you're wanting to fire off approvals on ticket creation then you might find automatic approvals work better for you.