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Question

Quick Fields Agent Start Session from Workflow

Quick Fields
Updated February 17, 2023
asked on May 6, 2020

We currently have a client that is setup with QF Agent and we use a schedule of 15 minutes to check a folder for new documents. I was wondering if it is possible to call a QF Agent session via workflow or a script to start the session when a document is created instead of on a schedule. Any help is appreciated, thank you in advance!

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Replies

replied on May 7, 2020

Hi Alex,

 

As far as I know it's not possible to invoke a QF session in any way, you can schedule it with the Agent but that's pretty much it. This kind of makes sense in a way, as if you could invoke a QF session from workflow, nobody would ever bother purchasing the Agent. Not sure if the Agent supports input however...interested to see other responses on this.

 

You can however do this the other way around, and invoke a workflow from a scheduled QF session, could you perhaps re-jig this process to use that method?

 

Cheers!

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replied on May 11, 2020

I thought I saw that QF agent creates a MS task for the scheduled time that workflow can then call. So you would still need QF agent, but you can then use WF and some scripting to call the scheduled job. This way instead of running it every 1 hour, we could schedule it to run every 5 hours, but then WF could run it when a certain condition is met.

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replied on May 11, 2020

What is the concern with running the Quick Fields session once an hour?

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replied on February 15, 2023

Hi Miruna, are there any plans to be able to call QF from WF? I know it has come up a lot over the years but still doesn't seem to be an option.

My use-case is:

  1. Users in accounting upload invoices that need to be paid via Forms
    1. These go into a Forms queue
  2. One vendor sends invoices in packets of 50-200 that need to be split
    1. Store in LF
    2. Split via QF and grab a little metadata
    3. WF then sends to Forms as tasks so they're all in the same queue
  3. The queue is used to organized work that needs to be done in the ERP (paying vendors)

 

That step processing with QF would be nice if I could do in real time vs. waiting for a schedule. Or worse, kicking off a schedule when the file is still being stored and having pages generated (haven't tested that situation yet but I will).

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replied on February 15, 2023

No. The architecture of Quick Fields does not mesh well with Workflow, so there would have to be significant changes. Quick Fields does cannot have document IDs injected into Capture Engine, nor can it run multiple copies of a session at the same time (which it would be likely to happen since Workflow can run multiple instances of the same time).

"Real-time" is definitely not possible since Quick Fields processing can be time consuming and Workflow is asynchronous. So you wouldn't want to do this processing while a user is waiting on the form page.

In your scenario, is step 2.3 trying to rebuild a queue of invoices corresponding to the packet they came from or is there just one big queue for all incoming documents?

 

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replied on February 15, 2023

Makes sense. Thank you for the info.

The final Forms bit is so that all of their invoice processing comes from a single queue in Forms.

  1. Main process is general AP, invoices from around the business that need to be approved and paid.
  2. Freight and Material invoices get paid with no approval required and come in as PDFs. Using a separate Forms process to upload those and add them to the queue. This way they only have to work from a single queue. Plus, it ensures that we get them converted to TIF and collect key metadata. (I use Forms for document upload and indexing a fair amount.)
  3. A single vendor sends these large packets that need to be split apart, which currently they're doing manually via Acrobat Standard. This way we can make their lives easier by splitting them, getting some basic metadata (our PO number) and putting them into the same "to be paid" AP queue in Forms.
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replied on February 16, 2023

Hi Pieter,

 

Not sure if this helps, but we've integrated Laserfiche with Abbyy for pretty much this exact use case (which you can call from WF).

 

Cheers!

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replied on February 16, 2023

So what is missing that would be solved by Workflow calling Quick Fields? Or what does Abby do different in this situation?

Batch comes in, gets processed by Quick Fields Agent and put back into the repository as individual docs, Workflow detects the creation of these docs and starts a "to be paid" Forms process for each as they come in. What am I not seeing?

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replied on February 16, 2023

Just the time delay. After the batch invoice is uploaded there will be a delay before the QF session runs since it's running on a schedule as opposed to on-demand.

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replied on February 16, 2023

I assume we're talking about self-hosted here and not cloud? Because if we're in cloud you could use capture profiles, which CAN be kicked off directly from a workflow. 

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replied on February 17, 2023

Thanks Tessa, yes that's right, I'm assuming this is self hosted.

 

In cloud, capture profiles on the whole is pretty good, the element it's missing in comparison to QF is the ability to split documents. Not sure if this is on the roadmap/radar yet? Cheers!

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