Clarity

Hi,

We have a requirement to validate timesheet data before user submits it for approval. It is to validate zero hours and blank timesheet. I know there is CA timesheet validation tool. But I want to do in programmatic way. Anyone done this before?

Regards,

Arun

One way to do that is to create a NSQL based portlet for items that do not validate.

"before user submits it for approval" - does not sound a valid check..... However, you should do the check when the user submits the timesheet

NJ

Yes NJ. When the resource submits the timesheet. Is that any way to validate?

What exactly do you mean with validation?

- testing a saved timesheet against defined criteria and displaying the result to the user (and other users) - a query based portlet would do this

- testing against criteria and preventing the user from submitting and notifying the user - a process could do this

- something different

Hi I want user to prevent from submitting zero hours or submitting blank timesheets. I need to display the error message

There is no "stock" way to do what I think you are describing. In order to present an error message at the point that the user submits an "empty" timesheet you would need the CA-Services timesheet validation tool (or develop some unsupported "hack").

The "stock" answer is to have a timesheet-proces which would return empty-timesheets, but this would be asynchronous (i.e. done in the background and the user would not immediately be notified).

I was thinking that you could modify the conditional timesheet approval process validation step to lover the limit to zero hours and do the return and notify the user if needed after the save attempt has been made.

^ yes thats exactly the "stock" solution - its just asynchronous.

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"We" all understand how Clarity works - BG processes/notifications etc - but when a "business user" asks for timesheet validation then I think that their expectation is something immediate - in their faces - "You can not submit this timesheet" error messages at the point of entry/submission*... but the product just does not work like that and it is our (unfortunate) job to have to explain that to the "business user".

(* - and If I didn't know better I'd expect timesheet validation to be at the point of entry too, I wonder if the new, simpler GUI interface to timesheeting implements that? Hmmmmm...)

Then you would also be familiar with how the data integrity and validators work: The admin runs them and gets a report and start kicking the users to get the problems with missing or incorrect data fixed.

Yeah would be interesting to see if there is a solution to alert at save when the timesheet has no hours and  you don't have any, but you must submit a timesheet for every period anyway.

The following idea may be something that you would want to get behind and vote on: Realtime Timesheet Validation

Yes we do this. We are MS SQL on premise.

We have a trigger on prtimesheet which is Invoked when the status is set to 1 (submitted).

If the timesheet data does not conform to our rules we automatically set the status back to zero and at the same time create a note against the timesheet and send an email to the user and their resource manager explaining why this has been done

^ yep, and while I have no doubt that that works, it falls into the "unsupported hack" category!