There might be times when you need to retract a pending request from the approval system. For example, if a request that is awaiting approval requires the approval of a user who has left the company, the request can become stuck in "pending" mode. To resolve this condition, you must back that request out of the approval system and resubmit it (after updating the approver group, of course).

When you have an approval request that is stuck in the "pending" mode, you can use the revertPendingStateChange operation to remove the request from the approval system. This operation also reverts the object that was pending approval to its previous state so that a user can submit the object for approval again.

Note that when you invoke this operation, you must specify the key of the registry object whose state you want to revert. You can obtain this key from the approval request that is stuck in "pending" mode. (You would need to retrieve that request, and the object's key, using one of the operations that returns an ApprovalRequestList.)

This operation returns a revertPendingStateChangeResponse message. The value of the revertedState parameter in this message reports the lifecycle state of the object on which the revertPendingStateChange operation was executed. For example, if you execute this operation on an object whose lifecycle state is pending a change from state A to state B, the operation will revert the object to state A and return state A in the revertedState parameter.