Limiting Forwarding on Decision Tasks

[Mark Pyc]

G'day Wuggers,

It's amazing how seemingly straight forward requirements can tie you up in 
knots.

What I require is the ability to limit the forwarding of a Decision workitem 
to only those people within the same organisation unit. In this case the 
Responsible Agents will be based on a combination of Plant and Company Code, 
and forwarding should be limited to those within the same Company.

The standard options for controlling forwarding are:
* General Task (therefore general forwarding)
* General Forwarding (the initially selected agent(s) will be limited to 
Possible, but then general forwarding)
* General Forwarding not allowed (initial agents and forwarding choices 
limited to Possible)
* No Forwarding (the ultimate in control)

With these as the only techniques the solution then becomes to build a Task 
per Company Code with appropriate Possible Agents. OK so far. With over 800 
Company Codes however, alarm bells start ringing - the smallest of text 
changes will require extensive maintenance (unless a standard text can be 
included - yet to be tested, esp for multilingual issues).

The next issue is that you want to have a maintenance table identifying 
which TS task exists for which company code and use the dynamic Task binding 
within the Workflow step. This is a great idea, but you can't dynamically 
bind Decision tasks!?! This is frustrating because it's the uncontrolled 
nature of decision tasks (i.e. no data related security checks) that makes 
this limited forwarding so desireable.

OK, so we can leep that hurdle by dynamically including a sub-WF which 
basically just wraps a static call to a standard decision task. So now we 
have a TS and a WS per company code. Workable, but it doesn't seem very 
elegant.

Now for the usual bit - Shirely some of you have faced this before...?

The programmer in me wants an alternative to all this maintenance of TS and 
WS objects. Is there anything like a user exit which can control the 
possibilities of forwarding?

In terms of how would I know the list of Possibles without refering to Task 
level possible agents - the solution in this case is a custom Authorization 
Object included in security roles (Thanks for the tips Joc, it's a nice 
technique). I can programmatically determine who has access to a given 
Company Code or Company Code/Plant combo for each logical WF Agent type (PO 
approver level 1/2, Invoice Reviewer ...etc).

Any suggestions or insights greatly appreciated. Hopefully I've just missed 
a completely obvious technique.

Have fun,
Mark

PS - SAP Enterprise 4.7 / 620