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Question

Does Workflow have an activity for check-out/check-in of documents?

Workflow
Updated September 22, 2016
asked on September 21, 2016 • Show version history

Our document repository is set so that we will house our ISO documentation in electronic document format (Word/Excel) in Laserfiche.  I'm working on creating a business process for the notification to owners, check-out, update, check-in, and update version information activities that occur on a monthly basis.  (Currently these documents are housed in SharePoint, but we are migrating them to Laserfiche.)

I was hoping to build a workflow that would checkout the document to a network drive to which the owners would have access then query the timeframe that the document has been checked out to send second (and third) notifications to users to complete their updates.

My questions are:

  • Whether there is a check-in/check-out activity in Workflow?
  • Can workflow query the status of a checked out document or the change in status of the metadata on a checked out document?

 

Looking for some thoughts on how to best achieve what I'm trying to do, thanks.

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replied on September 21, 2016

It does not. I don't think that would quite work the way you want it, because Workflow would check these documents out as the user specified in the connection profile, it wouldn't be able to impersonate users and check them out for them. You might be able to get a list of the checked out documents through SDK scripting.

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Replies

replied on September 21, 2016

Like Miruna said, if Workflow checks out the document it will show up as checked out by the Workflow user. If that isn't a problem, this could be done with the SDK. Your business process would check out the document and save it to the network drive. It would then check for changes to the checked out file on disk, update the copy in LF when the file changes, and update the metadata on the corresponding LF document.  If you need to get the list of checked out documents, there is a special listing type in the SDK (see this post for more information). This would be a pretty tricky SDK project.

That being said, it sounds like there must be a better approach, maybe the users could be emailed a link to the document (via LFE shortcuts or Web Access urls), and your Workflow activity could keep track of how long it has been since each monitored document changed.

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replied on September 21, 2016

Robert and Miruna, thank you both for weighing in on this.  I appreciate you identifying the issues that could occur with the checked-out user and the need to use the SDK to accomplish this.  I am considering another approach where I use workflow to copy it to a folder in Laserfiche in which the edits can be made and then have the document Saved back to the original folder to maintain the integrity of the versioned documents.

Would you think this an effective workflow:

 

  1. Query all docs in repository for revision date 2 months from now
  2. Identify owners of docs and send notice that doc needs review and updates
    1. Sub-workflow (custom scripting needed) to xref doc owners by position title to doc owners by name/email
      1. Add owner email to hidden field in template for use by later workflow activities
    2. Sub-workflow (custom scripting needed) to xref doc approver by position title to doc approvers by name/email
      1. Add approver email to hidden field in template for use by later workflow activities
  3. Copy selected docs to WS Check Out Folder (this is a non-versioned folder)*
    1. Change doc status to CHECKED OUT (from APPROVED)
  4. Notify WS Admin of list of documents moved to check out
  5. Sub-workflow to notify owners to complete documents after being checked out – RUN Daily
    1. If doc status = CHECKED OUT
    2. AND if current date is >= (creation date + 10)
      1. Send notice to owner to review/update
  6. Owner reviews and makes changes to doc
    1. Owner updates doc status to PENDING APPROVAL once changes are complete
    2. Owner saves (overwrites) doc to save changes
  7. Workflow picks up change in status to PENDING APPROVAL
    1. Workflow queries hidden approver email field in template and sends notification email to approver
  8. Sub-workflow to notify approvers to approve documents after being updated – RUN Daily
    1. If doc status = PENDING APPROVAL
    2. AND if current date is >= (modified date + 5
      1. Send notice to approver to review/update
  9. Approver reviews changes, makes additional changes
    1. Approver updates doc status to APPROVED once reviewed and changes are complete
    2. Approver saves (overwrites) doc to save changes
  10. Workflow picks up change in status to APPROVED
    1. Workflow notifies WS Admin
  11. WS Admin reviews changes for completeness prior to saving to versioned WS production folder
    1. WS Admin saves doc to WS production folder
    2. WS Admin applies appropriate version comments ** & version number
    3. WS Admin deletes document from WS Check Out folder
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View 3 previous replies
replied on September 21, 2016

That sounds like it might work.

2.1 does not require custom scripting, Owner Name and Owner SID are available as additional properties in Search Repository and you can then run Find User on either one to get the user's email. Same applies if you use an "owner" field for the owner name rather than the LF owner property.

Why copy the documents and not just make shortcuts into the WS Check Out folder?

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replied on September 21, 2016

Miruna,

Because we are driving ownership off position titles vs. login names I don't believe I can use the Owner Name and SID information.  We also use the position titles in the template owner field.

Copying the documents because the documents are versioned and we don't want every little change to result in a new version.  Unless there is a better way?  We also have the primary folder where these documents reside set to browse/read for all users except for the WS Admin and LF Admins.

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replied on September 21, 2016

How do you store the titles? Is it just one person per title? Find User could work off custom user properties both in LF (as attributes) and in Active Directory.

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replied on September 22, 2016 • Show version history

Miruna,

The titles will be stored in a SQL database extracted from our cloud-based HR system.  There is a one to many relationship between position and person. But, most of the owners/approvers will be in positions with a one to one relationship.

This is what I'm envisioning happening in 2.1:

  1. Do lookup of position title (on HR extract) to correlate owner name
  2. Do lookup of owner name (on AD extract) to correlate owner name to AD User
  3. Do lookup of AD user (on AD extract) to correlate AD user to owner email address

Would love to see how the " Find User could work off custom user properties both in LF (as attributes) and in Active Directory" would work if you have an example of it.

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replied on September 22, 2016

See "to add a custom property to a trustee" section on the help file. For LF users, they're stored in user attributes, so you can write a script to set them. For active directory users they're mapped to user properties in active directory, so if your IT already set them, Workflow can read them.

Here's an example of properties mapped from Active Directory. By default, Workflow reads the first and last name.

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replied on September 22, 2016

Miruna, I'm going to have to try to see what we have pre-populated and then attempt in Workflow to see what I actually get.  Thank you for the assistance!

Michelle

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