This information is 1 1/2 years old upon my submission.  Has this functionality matured ( EXTERNAL DATA QUERY ) or is it technically in the same place as of May 2020.  An update from anyone would be awesome.  We are moving to the cloud, so this needs to be understood.  I need to understand the real world limitations or advantages of Laserfiche lookups in the cloud.

The way I read it is as of now ( 12/7/2021 ), remote agents (specifically using data source plugin) can push the data to the laserfiche cloud environment. 

1.  Is that correct? If not, is there a method I have not mentioned here?

2. We have lookups that use data from the lookup to populate drop downs.  Customers select an entry from the, lookup populated, dropdown and that fills in a handful of read only fields from the lookup data.  Is there an issue using lookups this way with the cloud lookup functionality?

    2a. One possible issue could be that it takes 10 seconds from the point the form is visible to the point the lookup seeded dropdown is available.  Due to the request going out and the info being pushed acrossed the internet.  This is nuanced information I am looking for.

Any information is greatly appreciated. 

Your two options would be

1. Have the message start event form ask whether they are a new employee or existing employee first. If they are a new employee, show all the form fields and have the new employee fill out that form. If they are an existing employee, have them enter their employee ID or name (whatever you use to look them up) and submit the form.

Then in the process: On the message start event, select the option to "load next user task if it is assigned to the same user". After the message start event, run the WF to use the information gathered on the form to run an external data query and pass back all the employee information. After the WF service task, have a user task assigned back to the /_initiator with all the variables now populated. Because the task is assigned back to the initiator, it should load up automatically for that user. 

The problem with this solution might be the wait time for the user. After filling out their employee ID and submitting the initial form, it may take 10-20 seconds for the next form to load up with the data. Depending on how busy the remote agents are, it may sometimes take longer. This is the reason we need to enhance queuing/prioritization for remote agent requests before implementing this feature directly in forms. Give this a try and see if the performance is acceptable. 

2. Store the employee table as a lookup table in the cloud. Since employee's information doesn't change that often, you could do a nightly sync of your on-prem SQL server to a lookup table. Then you can look up data from that table using a lookup table query and those will be fast since the data is all in the cloud. I recommend this option if possible. Even after implementing on-prem SQL lookups in forms, pushing the data to a cloud table and looking it up from there will be much better performance. 

Thank you for your reply.

Thinking out loud.  My form is a replication of a current on-prem form (Employee Contract Approval).  The first part of the form is selecting either A)New Employee or B)Existing Employee.  The existing employees are pulled from a SQL database and populate a drop-down.  Would the workaround you mention work while the user is still filling in the form or is is kicked off on submit?

Anthony  

Thank you for the detailed response.  I agree, I think the second option makes sense.  Do you have any links or guides I can look over with regard to syncing on-prem data to a cloud lookup table?

Anthony