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Populating Employee Information on HR Forms: Retrieve From Template "Metadata-Only" or Dynamic Fields from Table?

Laserfiche Forms Version 10 How To
Updated April 22, 2020
asked on August 28, 2017

I'm trying to determine the best practice for populating relevant employee information on the various forms that are submitted, when the employee enters his Employee Id. 

If all employee information is captured from form submissions and saved to a Laserfiche repository with searchable metadata (by using a "Save to Repository" service task), would it be more efficient to populate relevant employee information fields on future form submissions by retrieving the variable values from the metadata, or would it better to use dynamic fields from an external table on the SQL Server?

Any direction you can provide will be greatly appreciated!

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SELECTED ANSWER
replied on August 28, 2017

Hi John,

I think this depends on 'when' you want to populate the relevant employee fields.

If you want the information auto-populated & displayed to the user when they initially fill out and submit a form,  you will need to go the SQL route.   To get metadata from the repository would require a workflow and that would not be available until after the form is initially submitted. 

If the information is to be populated after the form has been submitted, you could call a workflow to pull metadata back into your business process for secondary forms/approvals or save the form into the repository and again call a workflow to process the saved submission with metadata.

A bit more work initially but I think you would find setting up a database worthwhile with a lot more flexibility down the road.    Our HR department does not have any real hr software or database we could use and setting up and maintaining our own little hr database in much the way you outlined is exactly what we did.   

Once a database is setup it can also be used with dynamic fields on templates within the repository if your HR department manually scans/adds docs for employees.   Our HR dept loves just having to enter an employee number or last name and the rest of the metadata filled out for them as they scan in docs.

My 2 cents,  hopefully helpful!

Andrew



 

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View 1 previous reply
replied on August 29, 2017

Thanks, Andrew!  This method will provide much greater functionality for future forms and business processes.

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replied on August 29, 2017

I actually have a datasource set up in Forms to our employee database.  When an employee enters his/her employee ID, the rest of the data populates from our employee database on the form.  This way there are no misspelled names, job titles, etc...

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replied on August 29, 2017

Connection to an existing employee database would be ideal.   It sounds like John is in the same situation I was in,  we had no employee database to connect to!   It surprised me that HR did not have such a db.   We are not huge but close to 2000 employees.

What took more work than creating my own employee database was figuring out a way to know who the approver should be for each employee when they submit forms.   That required another db table that tied into and gleans information from Active Directory.   Requires a little maintenance to keep updated as people retire or shift jobs,  but works well.

Where there is Laserfiche there is a way .... even if you have to invent it!

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replied on April 22, 2020

I am doing the same things as above for private forms.  However, if I have a database table that I want to expose to a Public form this fails because the lookup table is inside the firewall.  Is there a way around this without opening firewall ports?

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