[SalesForce] Why Can’t I Assign an Approval Step to a Queue for a Custom Object Approval Process

Yeah you're correct in that you can't use a User lookup field as the "Specify Initial Submitters" value.

However, there is a somewhat acceptable workaround. You specify that All Internal Users (or whatever is the most appropriate broad category) can submit the object for approval. But then you add criteria to the Initial Entry Criteria which says that the current user must be the same as Responsible__c ($User.Id = Responsible__c).

The downside is that when the user is not allowed to submit for approval, the error message they get is not user-friendly and doesn't say "You must be the Responsible User".

You can address the error message / initial submission flow with a bit more work by creating a custom button that uses the Approval API to submit for approval, and then you get the luxury of being able to give your users very customized messaging and up-front workflows upon approval submission, but that's quite a bit more work.

SFDC developer support confirms that if you do a field update in an Approval Process step action and also have a VF (not text/HTML) email alert in the same approval process step action, that VF email alert will NOT merge in the updated-from-the-Field-Update value into the VF template. This is contrary to the doc which states that field updates occur prior to email alerts.

Note that text/html email alerts will merge in the updated-from-the-Field-Update value into the generated email.

The workaround, which I confirmed, is to:

1. Change the field update in the approval process step to 're-evaluate workflow after update' and
2. Remove the email alert from the approval process step's action list and
3. Create a normal workflow on your target SObject that tests for the value of the field update in #1 and includes an email alert for your VF email template.

Note that if you do a field update in step i of an approval process, the new value of the field WILL BE available to the email sent to the approvers in step i+1. It is only intrastep VF email alerts that don't get the new value of that step's field updates.

If SFDC support notifies me that this is working-as-designed, expect a doc update; if it is a bug, expect it to appear on Known Issues.

Update - SFDC R&D says this is working as designed -- here is their explanation:

R&D explanation:

########## CAUSE: The VF template queries the database to retrieve the field data, but the TEXT/HTML template shares the Entity > Object (Java) from the Workflow to merge the field data.

SOLUTION/WORKAROUND:

############## customer has 2 solutions here.

Either 1)Customer can use TEXT/HTML email template instead of VF template in approval process OR 2) Remove email alert(which uses VF template) from approval process and implement the workflow action to send an email alert(with VF template) when the status field changes. Need to select 'Re-evaluate Work flow Rules after Field Change' on field update under approval process.

Personally, I think this explanation needs to be added to the doc as it is counter-intuitive to think that VF email templates associated with WF alerts won't behave the same as text/HTML email templates with the same WF alert.