In Laserfiche Forms, an action performed in a User Task saves a different state (copy) of the form. For example, PersonA submits a form which goes to PersonB to review, make changes if necessary, and approve. The downside of this is any changes PersonB makes to the form is saved as its own copy in a different state and is not reflected in the view PersonA has in their history. Then what if after PersonB approves the form, the form initiates a Laserfiche Workflow which gathers other information and updates the form. Lastly, the business process saves the form to the repository and ends the process. Neither PersonA nor PersonB will be able to see the information that was updated on the form by the Laserfiche Workflow. Is there a way to save a copy/state of the form that both PersonA and PersonB can view later with the changes that where made by the workflow? Also, can this be done without creating and assigning a User Task to the 2 users and waiting for them to take action?
Question
Question
Replies
Idea 1
After the workflow, send an email to both person A and person B and attach the form with the current process data. Since the workflow will update the variables, the form sent in the email will show the current data after the workflow has finished. This would show both person A and person B what the final values were.
If you wanted to allow person A and/or B to update the values after that, you could add a user task assigned to both of them, but put a timer boundary event on it. If they wanted to make updates, they have 12 hours (or however many you set the timer to) to update the form and submit the task. After 12 hours, the task would be canceled and the form would save to the repository as is.
Idea 2
Is the goal that person A and person B can see the final form after it was updated by the workflow? If so, I'd recommend pointing them to the saved form in the repository. After the workflow runs, your Forms process saves the updated form to the repository. I would include the instance ID of the Forms process as metadata for this saved form. Then run another workflow to search for the new document, grabbing the instance ID of the Forms process and searching the repository for the saved form with that instance ID. Once you have the entry ID of the saved form, you could then email person A and person B with a link to the saved form in the repository.
Idea 3
The variables in the Monitor page are all current. If person A and person B have access to the Monitor page, they can find the instance and see the most up to date variables, even after the workflow updates them. It won't appear in a form, but you could check the value of each variable.
Thank you Jared for the quick response. I already have a form of Idea 1 and Idea 2 implemented but my hire ups aren't quite satisfied with that. Those are definitely valid for storing the information long term but makes gathering the information they need a little cumbersome. Also, the majority of our users have participant licenses so they don't get to see the monitor page.
I had an idea last night. What are the ramifications of a business process not reaching an End Event? For example, I place a User Task right before the End Event but don't have any buttons to progress the task. Since I don't know how the backend of Laserfiche works in regards to populating dashboards like the Inbox, Monitor page, etc., I don't know if leaving business processes open would cause any dire effects. Also, maybe I could leave a Complete button on the task where I or someone could eventually go and complete the task? Any thoughts?
Hey Jared,
Now that Empower is done. Any thoughts on my reply about leaving a Business Process open? Would I encounter any ill affects if I don't allow a business process to not hit an End Event?
Can you explain a little more what you are looking for and why ideas 1 and 2 weren't suitable? If you add a user task at the end and leave it in progress forever, do you imagine that these two users would be able to see it in their Available tasks section?
Depending on how many instances you are running, the plan to leave instances open forever may incur some performance issues.
Hi Jared,
So the example of the form being routed to Persons A and B is a very simplified version of our process. Without going into lengthy detail we have an existing Form/Workflow process in SharePoint which we converted to Laserfiche. The form being submitted contains sensitive financial information that are only for the eyes of the users to whom the form is routed to. The users to whom the form is routed are assigned dynamically so the form could be routed to Persons A, B, C, or Persons G, M, U, L, Q, or Persons A, H, G, T.
For Idea #1
Sending a email with the final version of the form one creates many copies of a document that might contain sensitive information. We have a policy discouraging the sending of attachments that might contain sensitive information. Secondly, the final version would contain information necessary for those who are approving the process throughout the life cycle of the form to balance their department budgets. Having to dig through emails to find each of the attachments they need to look at would be cumbersome and inconvenient. Yes, they could take those attachments and move them into a separate folder etc. but you try telling that to busy executives who may not be in the office much.
For Idea #2
As I mentioned, the form contains sensitive financial information and the only people who should be able to see the information on the form are those to whom the form is routed to. Since I am not able to set Repository folder security permissions dynamically, we are not initially letting people know that they can find the documents in the repository. Until we can find a way to set the security permissions dynamically we will refrain from allowing people to access that part of the repository.
For Idea #3
Only a handful of users will have the Monitor tab. We only have 10 or so full licences and the rest of our organization have Participant licenses. So that wouldn't be a possibility.
--------------------------------
Degraded performance is really what I needed to know so that I can make other suggestions to our executive staff. I am more likely going to try to persuade them toward creating a dashboard listing the completed forms with the information they need to view.
Just for my information, in what way does performance suffering having open business processes? At first I thought it would be that active processes remain in the inbox dashboards and completed processes only date back so far. However, when I look at my inbox on my test server that were completed or canceled about a year ago when we first started developing. Is there a certain drop off point for Completed processes? I can see how having many active tasks with Timers could affect performance since there are active listeners waiting for triggers but I don't understand how a simple user task would cause performance issues.
It would not affect process runtime as the user tasks are just "waiting for trigger".
One thing it would affect is the operational/performance report. When view the report, it would calculate all remaining user tasks to get the current statistics and performance. The request would be slower the more active user tasks you have.