Is it possible to prevent a customer from adding themselves as an Approver?

[Deleted user]

Background:  We have a few requests which require the customer to manually select their manager as an approver. 

Problem: A request just came through in which the customer added themselves as an approver and approved the request.  Is there any way to prevent a customer from adding themselves as an approver during the request creation process?

[Ivan Tovbin · Accepted solution]

Hi Patrick,

No, unfortunately you can't do that with basic Jira functionality. 

However this can be done using a 3rd party addon like ScriptRunner, Power Scripts or JMWE. They allow you to configure a scripted validator that will compare an issue's 'reporter' and 'approver' field values. If those values match each other, then it won't let your customer to transition the issue to approval status.

[Deleted user]

Thanks for the reply, Ivan.  We weren't looking to add any additional add-ons at this time but may need to reconsider in the future if this becomes a bigger problem.  For now we've instructed the agents to simply cancel any requests in which the reporter assigns themselves as an approver.

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi Patrick,

It was a big audit concern for us as well.  We used Scriptrunner to set the "Approvers" and the last step was to remove the reporter from that list...

What should really happen is that Atlassian should have looked at the conditions on the workflow step for approval so you could just put in there "Not reporter".  I tested that out did not work.

But weirdly if you expose a workflow step on the portal for the customers it DOES look at the workflow conditions for that step.  Found that out the hard way.

Susan

[Deleted user]

Thanks for the reply, Susan.  I agree that adding such a workflow condition would have been a great idea as this seems like a major loophole in any approval cycle.

[Evgeniy Russkikh]

Not sure you can do this with out-of-the-box Jira. But it is pretty easy with some plugins. For example, I'm using Power Scripts for Jira, which let me add scripted validators, so i can validate whatever i want