Hi readers,

My organisation is using LF cloud and I'm kinda responsible for working out how this things work. I have 3 immediate problems I'd love some help with in trying to achieve what's required. 

The requirement is basically this:

1) Kick-off a workflow from an external source. I don't think a workflow OR business process can be started externally via an API call, can it?  So to achieve that I'm trying to perform an API call to create a document (Doc1) in the repository, which in turn kicks off the workflow. But we are have permissions issues when testing the API. Has anyone managed this? Does the external API need to (a) call an endpoint to generate a temporary token and (b)  use that token to call a different endpoint to generate the document?

2) The workflow called by step #1 does some checks to make sure we're not making the same call twice. If no duplicate, I then create a folder and another document (Doc2) using the values from the (Doc1), and finally invoking another business process. This process displays a form (Form1), which needs to display some values from (Doc2) as read only. How is this best achieved?  By parameters? Or can we just pass the entry ID of (Doc2) to the business process, and retrieve these values in the business process via a service task call prior to displaying the form? I'd imagine the answer might be to pass a parameter if there's just 1 field, but what if there are 30 fields to populate from meta data?

3) Finally, (Form1) has a collection which needs to be saved somewhere. I'm aware there is a save progress button, however we have a slightly more complex issue...there will be (Form2) which uses (Form1) values as the "key" for a bunch of - lets just call them "attributes". 

(Form1)
ThingName                         ThingDescription
-----------------                        -------------------------
Thing A (single line)          Describes thing A (single line)
Thing B (single line)          Describes thing B (single line)

(Form2)
Thing A (read only)    Thing A-Attibute A (single line)   Thing A-Attibute B (single line)
Thing B (read only)    Thing B-Attibute A (single line)   Thing B-Attibute B (single line)

Further complicating things for this newbie, the user needs to somehow be able to return to (Form1) from (Form2) and make changes (add/edit/delete), which filter through to (Form2). How would this (Return to Form 1 link) be achieved? 

Any help around the overall architecture of my solution would be gold. My concept was to save (Form1) as (Doc2) meta data, then ​update (Doc2) meta data once (Form2) was submitted. I'm struggling with whether it's possible to prepopulate form fields from (Form2) with a query rule that looks up metadata. Can rules be run over metadata, or can they only be run over external databases and lookup tables? I can connect to an SQL database and save things there, just seems silly when we have these values in our (Doc2) metadata that you can loop through with a 'Find Entries' and 'For Each Entry' in a workflow, but don't seem to be able to use in a form.

I know that's a lot, but I've done all my can on my own; I can start trawling through the answers pages, but it would be much more efficient if an experienced user can set me down the right path....

Thanks in advance, Brett.