Form submission with multiple subforms within that form application

asked on August 21, 2017

Has anyone completed a Laserfiche Form that has multiple subforms in a collection within?

Concept idea:

A volunteer group is awarded grant money. That volunteer group gives out money to each of their project committees. End of year and we want a summary from each volunteer group, plus a report on each project that money was spent on.
The first page of our year end form is a summary; like a spreadsheet where each line shows the project committee name and the amount of money given/spent.
The subform; lets say there were six projects, so the applicant would need to fill out six subforms answering questions about the project (subforms hopefully activated by a collection field, or maybe the collection field is the summary section???).
We want the applicant to be able to open the LF Form for year end reporting, fill out the summary, and for each line on the summary be able to activate the subform to answer the questions, then submit with all being kept together.

Can this be done without too much complication? What I'd really like is to be able to open one of the Business Process Library forms and be able to adapt it for our purpose without me having to create it from scratch, but I haven't seen one like that in there yet. Anyone able to steer me in the right direction?

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replied on August 25, 2017

This is an interesting concept. I cant think of anything in the business process library that will bring you close to this.

If i was going to build this id probably create a table in a database to handle the data retention and use laserfiche forms with an attached laserfiche workflow to display data from and write data to the table.

Im happy to go into more detail on how you could build this but the short answer to your question is you will most likely have to build this one from scratch.

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replied on August 25, 2017 • Show version history

Thanks, Aaron. The data that is required for both the summary form and the subforms is to come from the applicant, so I can't see how the database would be helpful. We give the money out in one lump sum. The applicant divvies out that lump sump to recreation groups to spend, then must give us a list of who they gave money to and a report on each of those recreation projects. These will be different each year.

In the end, since I didn't find anything that I could do as I had imagined, we decided to scrap the summary report and will be having the applicant just submit (using the example above of six projects) six of the project reports, one separate one for each project. Our staff will then have to (1) contact the applicant to confirm that all their project reports are in and (2) create a summary report on each applicant showing our Council the years end results of the recreation grants handed out.

Actually, I just today had my first experience using LF Forms' report creation feature and I believe our staff could create the summary report using that tool, so it shouldn't be too hard to come up with the summary reports for each of the applicants.

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replied on August 25, 2017

Ok i see what you are saying. So one way you could achieve this is to have your initial form have a table where they can select the group and how much money they wish to assign to that group.

After they complete the form it can trigger a workflow and wait for it to complete. For each row in the table the workflow can spawn a laserfich form task with the questions you need answered in it, you can even pass over variables like the amount of money or the name of the group to it.

Once these sub tasks are completed, have them saved into the repository. While this is happening have the workflow checking for finished forms being sent into the repository and check them off as they apear.

Once all forms have been finished have the workflow send a completed variable back to the original form and finish the workflow.

The original forms process should now continue on and once you check that the variable sent by the workflow has been recieved finish your forms process.

I hope that makes sense. What you want to achieve is defiantly possible.

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replied on August 28, 2017

Thanks, Aaron! I can visualize what you're talking about doing here, but don't have a lot of experience with all of this. We have moved forward with the simpler option, but I like this idea and may still take the time to work it out, although it won't be this week due to other responsibilities.

If anyone out there has done something similar, would you share your forms/workflow designs?

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Form submission with multiple subforms within that form application

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