This will be a great feature addition.

This is definitely missing feature for APEX Approval workflows

It's really something you can already do today. Create a REST endpoint in your schema that actions this. The email would have to generate some kind of secure token that is recorded and then interpreted by your code in the REST endpoint to affect the desired action.

Could this be made easier out of the box? definitely. But just because something isn't declarative doesn't mean it's not possible.

Because lacking this feature, I have to re-write my apex application by using oracle workflow (we have oracle EBS product). End users really like they can click the approve or reject button/link to get action done without be prompted to login to Apex app each time. Any update on this request? Has apex team been working on this enhancement yet?

Thanks for all the votes, we know it is important functionality and hence added it to the roadmap. Will start looking into this ASAP

Is this functionality added?

Any update on when the functionality will be available?

This is definitely the missing feature.  I understand that this is not easy to do because you have to run API to pull email server for emails that are relevant and parse the email to retrieve the data for the response.  But having this feature will make APEX workflow feature more powerful.  Like @huining.zhang mentioned, we have to use Oracle EBS Workflow engine to handle this email approval instead of leveraging APEX native workflow for email approval type workflow processes.  So any movement on this feature is very welcoming.  Thanks

@jlam it can already be done with a little bit of REST magic, no need to pull server emails - it's all about a link that works on-click within the email, that triggers some code to do whatever you want it to do.

The feature is on our roadmap and is under development.

@jayson hanes we know that it can be done.  But this defeats the purpose of low-code theme.  Since we use EBS, we just leverage the EBS infrastructure in this area.  But I am glad that it is still on the roadmap.  Thanks for responding.  I have nothing but big high praises for the APEX team.  You guys kept amazed me with every release.  So I know that if this is on the roadmap, we are in good hands.  Thanks

This is important feature for enhancing user experience specially for leasership team.

Is this functionality added???

No, it is on the roadmap, as shown on this idea status.

As long as this one is still on the roadmap, I have hope.  But our company's time is starting to run out because we are in a process of starting to implement Fusion Cloud ERP.  So the EBS workflow option is no longer available when the project is done.  So hope that this is in the near future because we will have to design a brand new solution to get this feature to work.  Thanks

Was it added on 24.2 or will it take longer. Can there be any high level timelines on availability?

@astrohrishi this idea is in the queue along with 100's of others, and was not able to be prioritized for APEX 24.2, which was just released this week. When ideas have been delivered for an APEX release, we update the status as such.

When will Approve/Reject via Email be available readily, out of the box within APEX Workflows Component, as 90% of the times, users will Approve or Reject via email. We can redirect to the Task Details page, but exposing this would involve, allowing the APEX app to be accessible over the internet. This can lead to data breaches; hence bigger corporates expose their APEX applications only over their Intranet.

Using Custom Workflow Design - there are various workarounds to achieve using OIC and sending a formatted email to a specific inbox, that is being polled.

This is a critical feature especially when organizations are deciding which platform to use and is long overdue.

Conneqtiongroup.com

Any update on approval via email will be great, thanks!

@jayson hanes is there any update for this?  Thanks

The APEX PM Team has published a new blog addressing this subject! Thanks to Roopesh Thokala for his hard work!

https://apex.oracle.com/go/inemail-approvals

The APEX team's position on this feature request is such that it is not practical for APEX to “bake in” such an approach - as the email provider dependencies on available API's is best handled by the requirements of the business. This blog leverages the Microsoft Graph API.

I have to agree. There are so many providers, so many APIs and so little consistency out there.  Couple that with the myriad requirements that would pop up on a company by company basis and you're immediately in the weeds. Trying to bake something in would futile. 

As an example, at my company we were replacing a system already allowed for people to approve things via an email response.  The response could be one of 3 options: 

• Approve
• Decline
• Request more information

With each response the user needed to be able to enter a justification (or in the case of an information request - The text of the request). 

Our company has even standardized on Microsoft Outlook for the email client so you would think that rendering of the email (and the formation of the response) would be consistent across platforms (windows/mac) but that is not the case. 

Our solution ended up with multiple stages including a MS-Exchange mailbox, Power Automate scripts to read the mailbox, parse out the email response from the approver, translate it from HTML (if necessary) extract only the relevant parts (discarding all the email CRAP) and then storing the message in a Sharepoint folder until PL/SQL could wake up and process all incoming responses. 

Convoluted, and not “out of the box”!

Could we have simplified this process? Yes, but it would not have met the requirements of the business. 

Could anything we have done be considered “core” and could it have been used by another company? Probably not. (MAAYYBBEE our MS365 framework, but that's pretty focused on exactly what we need too). 

TL;DR - Every case is different and requires thougth and (likely) custom code. As long as APEX Workflow has the API's to be able to start/stop/manipulate workflow state, pretty much everything else in an email approval chain is going to be specific to your situation. 

My 2 cents… Your mileage may vary.

@jayson hanes Thank you so much for putting this Blog post.  It is very helpful and well illustrated.  Please send Roopesh my appreciation for putting this post together.  We will check into this approach.  Thanks

We have implemented the Approval via email in our company . but rather than using Apex human agent API's to approve or reject we are doing so via OIC integrations