Approval Processing

An approval process is an automated process your organization can use to approve records in Salesforce. An approval process specifies the steps necessary for a record to be approved and who must approve it at each step. A step can apply to all records included in the process, or just records that meet certain administrator-defined criteria. An approval process also specifies the actions to take when a record is approved, rejected, recalled, or first submitted for approval.

Apex provides support for creating a programmatic approval process to extend your existing approval processes with the following:

• The Apex process classes: Use these to create approval requests, as well as process the results of those requests. For more information, see the following:
  • ProcessRequest Class
  • ProcessResult Class
  • ProcessSubmitRequest Class
  • ProcessWorkitemRequest Class
• The Approval namespace process method: Use this to submit an approval request, as well as approve or reject existing approval requests. For more information, see Approval Class.

For more information on approval processes, see “Getting Started with Approval Processes” in the Salesforce online help.