Question

Why can't you have multiple starting events in one Forms business process?

Forms Business Processes Version 9 Ideas

Updated April 14, 2022

asked on February 20, 2014

I have a business process that starts from multiple forms and generally follows the same flow of activities/approvals. Rather than having two separate process, I wanted to keep all the forms in the same process, however it looks like this isn't possible. Is that a technical limitation or design choice?

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Answer

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replied on February 21, 2014 • Show version history

Multiple start events are allowed in BPMN, but are not possible in Laserfiche Forms quite yet. We will continue to add features to the Process Modeler, so it's likely you'll see the ability to use multiple start events in a future version of Forms. I'll mention this feature request to the team.

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replied on February 21, 2014

Awesome! Thanks, Eric!

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replied on February 21, 2014

You're welcome!

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Replies

replied on December 28, 2018

As an update to this post, we have started some initial work on additional ways to start processes. One of those is a starting event concept that would allow processes to be started by different triggers (like a form submission, timer, or repository events). We also are looking in to form on-submit actions that could allow multiple different forms to start the same process or one form to start multiple processes. There is no timeline for these features at this point.

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replied on June 19, 2019

Are we getting closer to a possible solution to this question? Similar to others I have one process for an organization that i would like to start with two different forms without doing creating separate Business Processes.

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replied on September 1, 2020

I concur, Trying to have multiple starting forms for the same process flow. One such starting form is one that gets completely filled by a Workflow process.

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replied on September 23, 2020

Hi Everyone,

Any updates regarding these?

I have multiple forms but one process only. How can I select each form in one starting form?

Thanks

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replied on April 14, 2022

For now, we've handled this via a param on the link. The param then shows or hides the form pages that correspond to it. Horribly complex method, but functional for now.
All forms then are Technically, one form, one link. Then have conditional flows, for handling the different types. A screenshot posted of one of my examples.

Complex example.jpg (48.67 KB)

| Download

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replied on December 28, 2018

Any luck on getting this added to a future version? I have a timecard form that tracks the hours people work each day and what they work on. Team 2 must fill this out every day, whereas Team 1 only needs to fill this out when they assist Team 2. Thus we have the process setup now so they start it by going to the URL or clicking the "Start Process" link for it. What we want is to have this form automatically assigned to each person in Team 2 every morning but still be able to manually start it as they do now for Team 1.

To make this happen, our current design has a scheduled Workflow that triggers the process each morning, invoking the process for each person in Team 2 and thus assigning it to them. This is working fine except we do not have access to the Workflow server (that is another group) and thus any time staff changes we have to wait for the Workflow to be manually updated.

What we'd like is to have the Process either be able to be started manually or on a timer, thus allowing us to maintain who automatically gets the form instead of needing Workflow. Another option would be to have another Process that runs on a timer and triggers the start of the timecard process. While it is nice to have Workflow to do a lot of this, it will make it much easier for the end users to build/manage if some of this functionality was also provided directly in Forms.

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replied on December 28, 2018

One way to potentially improve this process might be to run a lookup against the Forms database to query current team membership. This could be done on either the workflow side or the forms side so the Team 2 information is always up to date. You wouldn't have to wait on the WF team to perform personnel changes.

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replied on December 31, 2018

Thanks for the suggestion. We've used that before and I don't know why I didn't think to use that here. That's a great workaround for this but for smaller organizations who have limited IT involvement (thus no ability with Workflow), I still look forward to the enhancements you mention in your other reply.

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replied on February 21, 2014

I feel like this might be doable.

Can we not use a Start that goes to a gateway that will use the username of the starter of the process to identify which starting form to use?

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replied on February 21, 2014

It would be nice if we could just have a service task that, based on the routing of the process, would assign another BP Form to be completed by a certain participant for the rest of the current process to continue.

Use case:

I am an employee requesting to go on a company trip. They submit all the information and after an approval by a manager, they need to fill out a reimbursement form for the expenses incurred on the trip. Since the trip was approved in Forms, the process would want to be held up until that action is completed so that it completes and saves the form with the variable information from the reimbursement form in the fields for the original form.

The reimbursement form would be something not specific to that process, so we would want it to be able to be used in multiple instances. Maybe it's not it's own form, and only used in conjunction with other BP's, but it would be nice to be able to separate that out and have it as a standard component I can use.

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replied on February 24, 2014

Hi Kenneth,

Thanks for sharing your use case with us!

Forms team will investigate to support re-usable sub-process in future release, so that you can create a process like the reimbursement process, and other business processes can call it and pass variables to it and continue its own routing when the reimbursement process is finished.

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replied on August 4, 2015

Great idea. +1

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replied on June 1, 2016

Any progress on this concept?

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replied on February 28, 2018

Has there been any progress on being able to have multiple starting forms? Currently I have a number of forms which I've had to separate into different processes due to this limitation. I think this is a very important feature to have.

Can I get a status update or viable workaround?

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Why can't you have multiple starting events in one Forms business process?

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