SharePoint. Document approving with JavaScript

Hi all!

Let me introduce my first tutorial. This one will be about an approval workflow. During my career, I implemented a lot of workflows, implemented by the all technologies and instruments supported by Microsoft SharePoint, except the latest Flow, for the moment.

Visual Studio Sequential and State-Machine workflows and the SharePoint Designer, on the 2010 and 2013 platforms.Actually, 90% of them were the Approval workflows for the document processing.

And, basically, 100% of customers were very confused with the out-the-box workflow generated tasks.
Top 3 questions were:

• What is this?
• Where is my document?
• Can we built some document card?

So I was implementing workflows using this not very friendly tools and, additionally, add custom web-parts to the workflow generated tasks and approval documents to link them together.
But, at the end, all approving process is about:

• Change document status
• Assign document to the proper manager
• Change visibility for the document depends on the status
• Notifications

And we don’t need any designers or tools to implement it.

We can do this by using the SharePoint JavaScript API and insert some custom Html into the pages.

Additionally, it is very cool to have a document card with the Approve/Reject buttons for the manager and text field for a comments.
And this is exactly my tutorial about!

In the Part 1, I will show you some basic technics to set up SharePoint site, document library and then insert some basic markup and JavaScript into the page.

Enjoy!