This article covers how placeholders can be used as part of an approval definition in 2 places.

1. Approval recipient placeholders

2. Message field placeholders

1. Approval recipient placeholders:

Using placeholders as part of the recipients field allows you to pull in approvers relative to the ticket. For example, you may want an approval to be sent to the manager of the requester of the ticket. Or you may want the requester to be able to select their own approver from a dropdown field when creating the ticket.

Here's what it looks like when adding in a placeholder to reference one of these fields:

Ticket fields

The Approve app allows for approvers to be dynamically referenced in ticket fields, organization fields and user fields. On ticket fields this could be an approver that's selected from a dropdown by an end user, or entered into a text field by an agent.

To reference an approver in a ticket field:

ticket.ticket_field_(id)

When referencing a dropdown field, the tag value must start with a valid user ID of the approver in question, such as 123_dropdown. When using a text field, you may specify an approver by user ID or email address. Multiple approvers can be specified separated by comma.

Organization and user fields

Users and organizations can also contain custom fields that can contain approver information and are accessed in an approval like this:

ticket.organization.(organization field key)

ticket.requester.(user field key)

ticket.assignee.(user field key)

For sending approvals to all users of a requester's organization you can use:

ticket.organization.users

For sending an approval to a text field in an organization profile that has been selected in a Zendesk lookup field:

ticket.org_lookup_(ticket field id).(organization field key)

eg. {{ticket.org_lookup_24645991423513.organisation_approver}}

Indirections

It's also possible to reference the approver in a custom field of an approver itself found in a custom field. For example, if you had a custom field called "Manager", this way you could reference the manager's manager, or even the manager's manager's manager. This also works if an approver field contains multiple approvers, the app will then include all the managers of the approvers in the field.

ticket.ticket_field_(id).(user field key)

ticket.organization.(organization field key).(user field key)

ticket.requester.(user field key).(user field key)

ticket.assignee.(user field key).(user field key).(user field key)

Message field placeholders:

These placeholders are in general much simpler to get to. This can be done by clicking the 'insert placeholder' dropdown and searching for the field you need like this: 

However you are still able to construct your own liquid placeholders within the message to reference other things. For example, if you were storing the requester's manager's name and email address on the requester's profile, you would be able to inject this information using the following:

ticket.requester.custom_fields.(custom_field_key)