Programmatically setting up Approval workflow in MOSS

Out-of-box Approval works pretty well for simple content approval and that’s what exactly I wanted. If you attach an Approval workflow to a list from the UI you get number of options to set such as Approvers, People who needs to be notified and an important one if you want to update the approval status of a list item to Approved or Rejected is “Update the approval status (use this workflow to control content approval)” in “Post completion Workflow Activities”

As in most the real world situation I want to set this up during deployment process and not from the UI.

Following code snippet will set up your list with Moderation enabled:

SPList list = web.Lists["MyList"];
list.EnableModeration = true;
list.Update();

Following code snippet sets up the Approval work flow on the list

SPWorkflowTemplate baseTemplate = web.WorkflowTemplates.GetTemplateByName("Approval", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
SPWorkflowAssociation assoc = SPWorkflowAssociation.CreateListAssociation(baseTemplate, "Property Approval", web.Lists["Workflow Tasks"], web.Lists["Workflow History"]);
assoc.AllowManual = true;
assoc.AutoStartCreate = true;
string data = GetApprovalWorkFlowData();
assoc.AssociationData = data;
list.AddWorkflowAssociation(assoc);

In Above code snippet AssociationData property of SPWorkflowAssociation can be used to set things like Approvers, People who needs to be notified and “Post completion Workflow Activities” for content approval

AssociationData is in XML format and looks like:

<my:myFields xml:lang="en-us" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:my="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/infopath/2003/myXSD">
  <my:Reviewers>
    <my:Person>
      <my:DisplayName>Ketul Patel</my:DisplayName>
      <my:AccountId>domain\kpatel</my:AccountId>
      <my:AccountType>User</my:AccountType>
    </my:Person>
  </my:Reviewers>
  <my:CC>
    <my:Person>
      <my:DisplayName>Joe Doe</my:DisplayName>
      <my:AccountId>domain\jdoe</my:AccountId>
      <my:AccountType>User</my:AccountType>
    </my:Person>
  </my:CC>
  <my:DueDate xsi:nil="true"></my:DueDate>
  <my:Description>A new Property has been added to the system and requires approval.</my:Description>
  <my:Title></my:Title>
  <my:DefaultTaskType>1</my:DefaultTaskType>
  <my:CreateTasksInSerial>true</my:CreateTasksInSerial>
  <my:AllowDelegation>true</my:AllowDelegation>
  <my:AllowChangeRequests>true</my:AllowChangeRequests>
  <my:StopOnAnyReject xsi:nil="true"></my:StopOnAnyReject>
  <my:WantedTasks xsi:nil="true"></my:WantedTasks>
  <my:SetMetadataOnSuccess>false</my:SetMetadataOnSuccess>
  <my:MetadataSuccessField></my:MetadataSuccessField>
  <my:MetadataSuccessValue></my:MetadataSuccessValue>
  <my:ApproveWhenComplete>true</my:ApproveWhenComplete>
  <my:TimePerTaskVal xsi:nil="true"></my:TimePerTaskVal>
  <my:TimePerTaskType xsi:nil="true"></my:TimePerTaskType>
  <my:Voting>false</my:Voting>
  <my:MetadataTriggerField></my:MetadataTriggerField>
  <my:MetadataTriggerValue></my:MetadataTriggerValue>
  <my:InitLock>false</my:InitLock>
  <my:MetadataStop>false</my:MetadataStop>
  <my:ItemChangeStop>false</my:ItemChangeStop>
  <my:GroupTasks>false</my:GroupTasks>
</my:myFields>

Various elements in the above XML are pretty self explaining and roughly maps to relevant tick box or textbox on the “Customize Workflow” Page (CstWrkflIP.aspx)

<my:ApproveWhenComplete>true</my:ApproveWhenComplete>

Is the element to use to set the “Update the approval status (use this workflow to control content approval)” checkbox