Next approver cannot be either owner or previous approver

[Kate Carrillo]

We have been attempting to use Office Project Web Access for two weeks. We
THOUGHT that the previous week had gone fine. People were able to submit
their timesheets, the manager approved them, and we created invoices based on
them. However, this last week we've had all kind of problems.

The timesheets submitted last Friday are stuck in a Submitted/Processing
status. In the Timesheet Approvals page, it displays: "Next approver cannot
be either owner or previous approver" (we have only one approver).

Some of the time sheets have an error status. If you look at those
timesheets, they have a message saying: "While communicating with the Project
Server an error occured. Check connectivity with your administrator to
determine if further action is necessary."

I've looked at the approver's permissions to see if anything didn't look
right, but he has all rights to do everything granted to him.

In Manage Queue the jobs all display as "Waiting to be Processed." However,
if you select one or more jobs and select "Retry Jobs" nothing changes.

I looked at the timesheets from the previous week, none of which show up in
the Timesheet Approvals page, and they have a status of "Failed And Blocking
Correlation"

Error Details:

Error summary/areas:
Resource 77f1dc26-bc35-45f3-9692-09e75abbdffe is listed as next approver for
timesheet a22572dc-458c-4821-8c80-287c4f333be2. Timesheet owner or previous
approvers cannot be approver
TimesheetInvalidApprover
Queue
GeneralQueueJobFailed
Error details:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<errinfo>
<general>
<class name="Resource 77f1dc26-bc35-45f3-9692-09e75abbdffe is listed as
next approver for timesheet a22572dc-458c-4821-8c80-287c4f333be2. Timesheet
owner or previous approvers cannot be approver">
<error id="3205" name="TimesheetInvalidApprover"
uid="1ec38cc6-1e43-47f4-a4e3-fc7700f2d8d5" />
</class>
<class name="Queue">
<error id="26000" name="GeneralQueueJobFailed"
uid="1afe4530-ac7f-44dd-9350-01f65bf34312"
JobUID="08c3bb22-4746-4923-9360-0a8c4f49c10f" ComputerName="DM-MOSS"
GroupType="TimesheetReview" MessageType="ReviewTimesheetMessage"
MessageId="1" Stage="" />
</class>
</general>
</errinfo>

I genuinely don't know what to do here. It's like some process failed, and
now everything is stuck in the queue. But I don't have a clue as to how to
resolve it. Any help appreciated, please.

 

[Jonathan Sofer]

Were you able to verify that the timesheets were at any point approved and
then reverted back to submitted/processing state or were the timesheets
never actually approved?

I have not heard of this error you mentioned so that seems very strange.

As for the queue jobs, if there are job waiting to be processed then there
is at least one job in either of the following states that needs to be
addressed and is usually in queue position 1 for the thread.

1) Failed and blocking correlation
2) Getting enqueued
3) Processing

1 - You will need to cancel this job or retry it. If you cancel, you might
want to uncheck the box in the advanced section that cancels all related
future jobs. This might prevent you from losing all those timesheet
submissions and will allow all the jobs waiting to be processed to actually
process.
2 - You will need to cancel this job type by going to the advanced tab and
checking the option "cancel jobs getting enqueued. Again, you might want
to uncheck the box in the advanced section that cancels all related future
jobs so that they might actually process.
3 - This means your queuing service is most likely stuck and needs to be
restarted on the server. After it is restarted the jobs that are stuck in
processing state will most likely finish.